Review: Ruth Garbus • Profound
Ruth Garbus, Profound on Orindal: noonday folk, two Fauré translations and wrinkles sung aloud — the freak soul ageing like a vine on the warm wall of home.
There's an imaginary dial beneath this record, and it doesn't tell the hour one would expect from Ruth Garbus. Anyone who knows her past — the freak-folk of Feathers, the minimal melancholy — would picture a low, late-afternoon light.
Profound, instead, lives at noon: the sundial with its shadow nearly perpendicular to the gnomon, the hour when nothing long is cast any more, when things simply stand where they are, lit from above. It's the same sundial as Linda Perhacs', only turned a few hours on: fewer psychedelic rays fraying at the edges, more a vertical light that clarifies. Garbus is forty-four, she says so openly, and this is the record in which she stops casting long shadows.
"I Think I'm Ready Now" declares it from the title. A ballad of a piano that came into the house for a single day, and the sun barely grazes it — brushes it, the way you touch a thing you've grown sure of again. She calls it "a song about being a ripe fruit," and cackles at her own audacity; but under the wisecrack lies the record's true gesture, a pacified surrender, the laying down of shame the way you lay down a coat in a warm room.
"Clair de Lune" is the secret centre, and here Garbus does something few will notice. She takes Fauré — electric piano and guitar interlacing a line out of the planh, a medieval lament tinted seventies — and with it she takes, without saying so, Verlaine: the original text is the one in which the soul is a chosen landscape and the masks sing sadly beneath their disguises, while the moon sets the birds dreaming in the trees. Verlaine, the cursed poet, wrote melancholy inside the revel. Garbus translates it into English and reverses its sign: her voice is the pure joy of one who is present, bound to the place, no longer masked. It's an ancient lament sung as though it were a thanksgiving — recited and given, in the manner of things handed down before the idea of publishing existed.
In between, the record breathes through stark juxtapositions. "Nothing and Everything" lays a four-four kick under a few suspended chords and leaves all the room to the telling: the melody has the frame of King Crimson, prog pared to the essential. "500," under two minutes, is ancient music for guitar — a monody, the guitar almost a lyre, with the voice accompanying on nothing but syllables: song before words, melody in the state of bare intonation. "Sunny Summer Guy" arrives on a feathered drum machine, sweet and unhurried, and speaks all the satisfaction of someone who has lived her life and takes pleasure in it without shame — folk-pop without a grain of pose.
"Nocturne" — the other Fauré — is the gem. Garbus tells herself with the intimacy of someone singing to the birds rather than to an audience, and the piano stays electric: a choice that says something: it sets the music apart from anyone who might find an acoustic piano anywhere, anchoring it instead to longing, to the fantasy of a sound one doesn't entirely possess. It's the point where Profound is most defenceless and most assured at once.
And "Tall Face" closes by stripping folk-rock to the bone, letting Garbus' freak soul surface from a distance: two piano chords in a hammering/insistenti ostinato, the permission she grants herself to take herself less seriously. She sings that her "luxurious wrinkles wind like a vine" around her face — ageing told not as loss but as vegetal ornament, a climbing plant on the warm wall of a house. It's the last shadow shortening, and Garbus watches it shorten without regret.
Artist: Ruth Garbus
Album: Profound 2026 (Orindal Records)
Duration: 37'
Genre: folk, psych folk, jazz folk
Tracklist: I Think I'm Ready Now, The Lost Soul, Clair De Lune, Nothing and Everything, 500, Sunny Summer Guy, Tip of the Hat to Fleur, Nocturne, All E-Lone, Tall Face
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