Caroline Shaw and Attacca Quartet Evergreen Review: Deep-Rooted Emotional Resonance

Caroline Shaw’s Evergreen, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning composer’s second album-length collaboration with New York-based string collective Attacca Quartet, follows a traditional three-act structure—albeit in an unconventional way. The album is evenly split between pieces written for a string quartet and those written for a quartet plus voice, with Shaw—who recently scored Josephine Decker’s film The Sky Is Everywhere—pushing her harmonious vocals to their highest register on tracks like the angelic “Other Song.”

The album’s instrumental suites, the towering “Three Essays” and ephemeral “The Evergreen,” are divvied into several standalone tracks—three and four, respectively—with an additional three songs in between. Thus, Evergreen’s structure becomes easier to recognize in terms of major divisions, and a definitive beginning, middle, and end. (The album’s 11th track, “Cant voi I’aube,” serves as a kind of coda.)

The first essay, “Nimrod,” bears a carefree and instinctual compositional character across its eight minutes, organically veering from fits of tight, frantic pizzicatos into ornate violin legatos with surprising grace. While still operating within a “classical” tradition, nothing about Shaw’s colorful chamber music or Attacca Quartet’s interpretation ever sounds outdated.

The coarse textures found in the experimental introductory seconds of “Echo”—the byproduct of screechy E-strings being stretched to their breaking point—are harsh and confrontational, a motif for the rest of the track as it ebbs and flows between disparate rhythmic states. The third and final of Shaw’s treatise, “Ruby,” is as equally a dynamic and volatile piece but ranks as the most conventional of the trio if only by comparison.

The frenzied meter established by Three Essays begins to stagnate in the following three songs. While the baroque “And So”—a previous version of which featured Anne Sofie von Otter’s velvety mezzo-soprano gracefully gliding across it—and “Other Song” have brief moments of deafening acoustics, they’re both relatively straightforward pieces that lack the intensity of the preceding essays.

“The Evergreen” drags Evergreen’s pace down to an even slower crawl but provides subtler grace notes than the album’s prosaic midsection. The piece’s four earthly movements—all named after botanical terms—traverse a tree’s sylvan ecosystem with an unhurried stride. The delicate “Moss” quietly builds for a few solemn minutes before erupting into a series of high-pitched consonances, while the sporadically plucked strings on “Water” perfectly replicate the pitter-patter of scattered rain showers, the residue of which cascades into the patient “Root.”

As its title implies, “Root” is supposed to serve as Evergreen’s figurative support system—the looping, elongated melodies establish a foundation for the rest of the album’s intricacies to grow from—though its placement toward the end of the album becomes a tad confusing in this sense. But even if Shaw’s sequencing strategy is unorthodox, Evergreen stirringly demonstrates that the emotional resonance of her music remains steadfast and unwavering.