We have seen wonders aplenty over the past year, friends, belly dances and bluegrass masses and crowds bursting into spontaneous applause at the conclusion of guitar solos at Midlake gigs, but little could have prepared us for the fourth album by Vermont songwriter Anais Mitchell.
Hadestown is a folk opera based on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, transplanted to a post-apocalyptic Depression-era America, with Mitchell and Bon Iver in the title roles, plus cameos from label boss Ani DiFranco as Persephone, the gravel-voiced Greg Brown as Hades, the Low Anthem's Ben Knox Miller as Hermes, and the weird sisters Petra, Rachel and Tanya Haden as the Fates.
The result, as you might imagine, is epic and expansive enough to make one of Hal Willner's ensemble jobs sound like a bunch of 14-year-olds in a garden shed. Partially funded by the Vermont Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts, Mitchell's twenty compositions are lushly scored by Michael Chorney and immaculately recorded by one Todd Sickafoose. The scope of the material ranges from ragtime Louisiana funeral jazz (the antic 'Way Down Hadestown'), steamy Latin Americana ('When the Chips Are Down'), folk reveries like 'Epic' and 'Hey Little Songbird' and 'How Long?', dustbowl pedal steel blues and chain gang gospel ('Why We Build the Wall', with Brown as James Earl Jones with a six-string), the Raindogs jazz of 'Our Lady of the Underground' (DiFranco scatting like a Siamese cat), and the percussive barrio barrage of 'Papers'. Such a sprawling work demands a sublime finale, and we get it in the form of the closing suite, 'His Kiss, The Riot'/'Doubt Comes In'/'I Raise My Cup To Him'.
Hadestown is a panoramic neo-Brechtian extravaganza that suggests The Flaming Lips' Oklahoma as much as Rodger's and Hammerstein's. Our only complaint is we didn't get to see it enacted on the stage.