Strangely wonderful

If you’re looking for polished presentation, skin-deep emotion, and well-mannered performances, turn around! Josiah Altschuler’s solo cello and voice pieces are anxious Americana vignettes so sharp they cut through bone and tissue to get to the heart of the music. As a bioinformatics programmer at Harvard by day, you might think his experimental-gothic take on these popular songs would sound scientific or overly academic. Instead, these “Murder Ballads and Love Songs” (smart and precise as they are) peel away the layers of a devastated world to reveal things both disturbing and beautiful beneath the scarred earth. Altschuler’s unorthodox cello technique, more like strumming and fingerpicking a guitar, propels the tunes with percussive pops, pounding, clicks, and finger slaps. His haunting voice, whisper thin and rhaspy, resonates in the darkness, ghostly and distant. Snd yet it feels heavy as a sermon from a fire-and-brimstone preacher just down from the mountaintop. This is a fantastic album of diverse cover songs that find new life and meaning when recontextualized by Josiah’s unique blend of indie-Appalachian influences, Country folk, and Delta blues.