Depending on your point of view, The Trumpet Child may be the record Over the Rhine have finally allowed themselves to make, or perhaps should have made long before now. For a band defined by its aesthetics, more than likely it's the first one. It's as if they needed to get all that suffocating darkness into the open, in order to really enjoy themselves apart from the long night of entrenchment in OTR's sepia-toned universe of arty cool. The vein they mined for a decade and a half transformed itself into a hangman's noose -- albeit one of silk. In the end, it doesn't matter; The Trumpet Child will either liberate them from the devotional wilderness of their cult and bring them into the open or send them scurrying back there for cover. While The Trumpet Child is not drenched in the intense emotional imagery, ambivalence, and near pathos of their previous offerings, that doesn't mean those qualities are not here. They are, but less so. In fact, despite its careful, sparse mix and simple, spacy arrangements, this album amounts to a shout of joy in comparison to earlier offerings. Produced by Brad Jones and recorded in Nashville, the album's music is steeped in the other kind of Americana: not the gothic country one that gave listeners the Cowboy Junkies, Steve Earle, latter-day Emmylou Harris, or the imagined planes of Daniel Lanois' world, but the one that bred Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, Randy Newman, Jack Teagarden, Rickie Lee Jones, Maria Muldaur, and Tom Waits.

1		I Don't Wanna Waste Your Time
2		Trouble
3		I'm On A Roll
4		Nothing Is Innocent
5		The Trumpet Child
6		Entertaining Thoughts
7		Who' I Kiddin' But Me
8		Let's Spend The Day In Bed
9		Desperate For Love
10		Don't Wait For Tom
11		If A Song Could Be President