Blessed with the most evocative voice in all country music, Emmylou Harris is something of a sacred cow, not least because of her relationship with the late Gram Parsons.
Much is being made of the difference in the production of Stumble Into Grace from Harris's pre-1990s records, but the truth is, while little of it is recognisable as traditional country, much of it sounds dated none the less.
There is a polite, glassy, suffocating sheen of late-1980s AOR trapping songs such as Lost Unto This World, obscuring their urgency. Particularly nauseous is inauspicious opener Here I Am, which disappears into the kind of bland matrix of harmony you would expect from a vapid chart ballad.
Subtle exercises in pushing genre boundaries, these (mostly self-penned) songs deal in profundity without resort to cliche, and they deserve better than to have the life polished out of them.
