On Sacred Ground

by Eligh and Jo Wilkinson

This is a very strange project from Eligh, of Living Legends fame. It is a project he has done with his mother, the singer Jo Wilkinson. I heard some positive buzz about this album, and since so little has been coming out lately, I thought it was worth a shot, expecting something a little along the lines of Blue Sky Black Death's 'Slow Burning Light's' project. That's not what this is though....

Wilkinson has a lovely deep singing voice, and adds a lot of texture to some of the tracks on this album, but can't pull off the songs that feature just her singing, with her son on the boards. When they are both laying down vocals, the songs work wonderfully, but that accounts for only half (or less) of the album.

This cd is at its best when Wilkinson is relegated to singing choruses, and Eligh is joined by the likes of Grouch, Pigeon John, and Slug (making his now-obligatory 2009 appearance). These songs fall into the same camp as much of the Living Legends output - they are slower and more thoughtful than much that you hear in hip-hop, and very atmospheric.

The Wilkinson solo tracks bounce among a pile of genres. 'Praises' reminds me a little of some slower Transglobal Underground, with its world music sound, and is probably the only one of these solo songs that will make it onto my ipod. Others, like 'Poet Man' belong on a lesser Joni Mitchell album. At other times, Wilkinson takes on the role of 'funky Grandma', and the results are a little embarrassing (I think the track is 'Embrace', but I'm honestly too wearied by it to double-check). Most egregious is the title track, 'Sacred Ground', wheron Wilkinson reads a poem including lines like "Her grandmother smiled as only grandmothers can", which made me look forward to the day that Thomas Kincaid releases a set of memorial plates to commemorate this album.

It's always nice to see artists try new things, and parts of this album are of the level of quality I've come to expect from Eligh, but other parts are badly misconceived and should have been cut.