Review: Kasey Chambers offers sly, fearful fire-side tales with ‘Campfire’

The yellowed pages were brittle between my fingertips. The binding torn and splintered into shreds, and the pages of traditional hymns were all askew. Titles like “How Great Thou Art,” “It is Well” and “Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus” were faded but could still strike glory in the coldest of hearts. The altar was littered with furiously burning candles, licking at its wax with mighty anticipation, awaiting for sinners to seek shelter, and the gatherers moved their lips in unison. It was a stunning display of faith, and at six, even I knew the implications of such a long-standing ritual. Sputtering words of salvation, absolution and endurance rose out over our heads, and chills ran down my spine. The atmosphere, soaked in holy wonder and weepy-eyed blessedness, popped and fizzled, lending easily to a weary moment of catharsis. Employed in various contexts, from early morning sermons or blustering mid-summer, late-night revivals to secluded, mountaintop reveries, words can carry with it a truly marvelous beauty.

With her 12th studio album, appropriately titled Campfire, Kasey Chambers draws upon her own convictions from the barren and remote locale of the Australian outback for a set of deeply-moving testimonials, bred within the flames of a roaring, brilliant flame. The singer, songwriter and vocalist invites the listener into her circle, joined by her trusty and ragged band of players, who go by The Fireside Disciples, Brandon Dodd (touring companion for the previous three years of road-work), family friend and Broome, Washington Indigenous elder Alan Pigram (of The Pigram Brothers), and her own father Bill Chambers. The performances are rather granular, organic and firmly planted in the earth’s rich shell. The soil has been well trodden by many pioneers and weathered foragers before them, but there is a certain magic Chambers casts into a swirling, witchy cast-iron pot. Her warble is as frighteningly heart-rending as ever, particularly when she weighs love’s violent force. “I’ve heard love is brave / But your love’s gonna put me in an early grave,” she wanders, ghost-like, across one of the album’s most grisly songs.

Embedded in the framework of Campfire, popular Biblical tales are reimagined as wispy, fire-side jams. “Goliath is Dead,” inspired by the famous David and Goliath battle from the Book of Samuel, a momentous event during which David outsmarts the pagan warrior, is a delightful and heady session. “One of these songs burning a hole in your pocket / Would you pick it up and put it in a sling shot rocket / Gonna light that flame / Gonna roll that stone / Gonna make it rain / Gonna bring it out home / Cut off his head / Goliath’s dead / Bag him up and bury his bones,” she harpoons at the speed of light, accompanied by chugging guitar, harmonica and sooty background vocals.

“We’ve failed you Abraham / We’ve come unstuck / We’ve failed to understand / And we’ve fucked it up,” she withers seconds later on the ambitious, six-minute ballad called “Abraham,” which assists in making sense of the world. “I think that’s one of the most personal songs I’ve ever written, in terms of really digging deep and what you truly are feeling about stuff in the world and how it affects you and how it affects all of us,” she explained. The song is languid and frail, but leaves a tremendous impact. Her vocal claws at your soul, requiring you to reassess your own place and role in such a troubled world. The fiery censure drops from her mouth. “When it’s all gonna end with a lightning bolt, you were right to condemn / ‘Cause it’s all of our fault / We’re probably gonna turn to pillar of salt,” she sighs, a heaviness leaving her body and rising into the ether, melting together with the campfire’s white-ash smoke.

“Campfire Song,” featuring a hushed, spiritually-laced spoken-word interlude by Alan Pigram, serves as the centerpiece, setting the starry and sweetly-driving tone of the album. The musicians gather closer to the campfire’s edge to reinvigorate their hands, hearts, minds with its excellent warmth. “Everyone sing ’round the campfire where the song of the color awaits,” Chambers sings, her breathiness is gliding, smooth, cunning even. She drifts between the faded images with agility, but her sternness in remembering her adventures remains the glue connecting each fevered dot. From Australia to Africa to Norfolk Island to America, the earth’s many cultures and peoples are forever seared into her skin, as if she has been branded for life. “All these four places have had a significant impact on shaping who I am, both musically and personally. I have taken all of those experiences and put them into the songs and sounds” on the album, she said in a statement. Campfire is planted in her unfailing vocal inflections, but there is a honeyed, expansiveness to such standouts as “Orphan Heart” (“Take my wine from muddy waters / Then, let me walk beside,” she weeps over the tear of banjo and guitar) and tribal number “Big Fish,” curled from her obvious African excursions ⎯⎯ “Everybody rally in the morning light / ‘Cause the kids don’t mind if the fish don’t bite,” she paints, the pitter-patter of animal-skin drums echoing in the distance.

“The Harvest and the Seed” finds Chambers culling the talents of Emmylou Harris, who sits a spell in a storytelling round for a tale about a lonesome way of living. “Can I rest here a while till we go out of style / And the birds know the scarecrow is tired,” Harris whispers into the dusky horizon. “‘Cause I’m the last in a row to pack up and go / But at least we can both say we tried…” When the pair sing in unison, it’s both glorious and utterly devastating; the performances are enlivened from their wealth of lived life, dog-tired as they might be. There remains a strength singing just beneath, bubbling up in just the right moments.

The intimacy of the campfire is exhibited throughout much of the record, allowing Chambers even more license to turn ever inward, escaping from the world, as you’ll hear with “Junkyard Man,” the sharp-witted “This Little Chicken” (spotlighting her father’s exuberance and flaky humor) and “Fox & the Bird.” Chambers’ voice crackles, dwindling richness made vibrant again, the outskirts a bit feathered and fading, and you learn of her misery in new shades. “The campfire was the heart of our existence: for survival, creativity, inspiration. We hunted all our own food and then cooked it on the campfire,” she said. “My brother and I did all our schooling via correspondence around the campfire. We used the campfire for warmth and light. We gathered around the campfire at night to play songs together as a family. Our connection to music and the land has developed through and around the campfire since I was born, so it has always stayed with me as a special part of my life.”

Campfire is a lovingly knitted quilt, flourishes of heart and hope braided along the fringes to accentuate her supreme songwriting. Coming off so quickly from 2017’s double-decker Dragonfly could have resulted in half-baked ideas, dyed in watered down pastels, but Chambers continues to remind us what a remarkable storyteller she really is. Religious or not, the album incites speculation about life and love, birth and death, the past and the future ⎯⎯ and whether or not the gates of Hell are literally opening up before our very eyes.

Grade: 4.5 out of 5

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