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Album review: Over the Rhine’s ‘Meet Me at the Edge of the World’

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The Ohio-based husband-wife duo of Linford Detweiler and Karin Bergquist has long been making soul-nourishing music, and the richness only deepens in their new effort in collaboration with producer Joe Henry.

The edge of the world the duo seeks seems to be the nexus of body and spirit. In “Called Home,” Bergquist uses her gorgeous alto to describe a place “where evening shadows come to fall/on the awful and the beautiful/Every wound you feel that needs to heal.” Detweiler gets one of the best couplets on the record in the love song “All Over Ohio” when he reveals: “I still get shivers when I hear you singing down the hall/I’m gonna kiss you all over Ohio.”

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It’s not exclusively an excursion into the ethereal — they give the body reason to move in the thumping “Gonna Let My Soul Catch My Body.” But they also recognize the fact that “I’m living here on borrowed time.” As if to underscore the old-school ethic at work, the 19 songs are grouped into four batches labeled Side A, B, C and D, which is how they’re spread out over the vinyl double LP version. Over the Rhine seems to inhabit another time, one that sounds awfully appealing here.

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Over the Rhine

“Meet Me at the Edge of the World”

Great Speckled Dog Records

Three and a half stars (out of four)


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