Barbara Garneau - Only In God

RPC - LP

Christian Folk

We’re back in operation after a short summer hiatus. We wanted to come back with a bang (a new website), but things always take more time than expected, so here’s quite the opposite of a bang: one of these dangerously haunted pieces of Americana, an LP of frail Christian Folk fronted by ghostly vocal harmonies, recorded in the early years of Jimmy Carter’s presidency, at the dawn of US neoliberalism.

Eric Rohmer once complained after a screening of an Ingmar Bergman’s flick that the movie was obviously a very well-made piece of art, but also somehow despicable because of its blatant and total lack of optimism. Like Rohmer, I tend to despise utter pessimism, and I am most likely going to be more lenient with works of art that show even small signs of optimism. That’s precisely the case of Barbara Garneau’s Only In God LP, not celebrating God in all its brightness, but rather the soft light of a flimsy candle in darkness, the kind of dim light that also flickers in the heart of David Lynch’s dark America: glimpses of hope in a dark dark world. 

Barbara Garneau’s world is lost, and permacrisis has long replaced the punctual oil crisis of the 1970’s, but still, it seems we can now see a light at the end of that long neoliberal tunnel. We won’t make it without a little hope, though. (VG/VG+)