It's not that I've been a huge fan of John Vanderslice, as I have not heard too much of his work.  However, the current release from his new Emerald City recording on Barsuk, "White Dove" (video here), is both incredible and scary.  Musically, "White Dove" is both melodic and noisy, a perfect vehicle for the song's emotional catapult from a pleasant conversation with a new neighbor to anger, rage, and sadness.  It's a song that lays bare the emotion felt when we witness some unspeakable crime or atrocity and a desire for justice rises in us, and then we wonder what to do with the emotion.

On "White Dove", Vanderslice sets up a contrast between that symbol for peace and the troubled, violent content of the verses. Vanderslice's narrator meets his new neighbor and sitting on her veranda asks a simple question-- "Do you have any children?"   This is the precipice of change in the song.  Grief streams over the neighbor's face. She tells the story of her daughter, who disappeared and was brutally murdered. "It's not about mercy/ It's not about tears anymore," the neighbor says, and Vanderslice must grapple with both her desire for righteous vengeance and the human capacity to commit such unspeakable acts. "What are you thinking of?" he concludes, unable to find resolution.

It's an emotion that Christians are familiar with and should not suppress or ignore.  Reading the Psalms we know the anger, righteous indignation, and borderline despair of the writer at times.  And yet justice is for God to mete out, and we lay our anger and desire for justice before Him, not taking it into our own hands.  I don't know the neighbor's grief.  I don't know whether or how I could forgive such an act.  But I hope and trust I would take the anger and grief to the One who says "Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled."  And I hope, like the Psalmist, I wouldn't hold back but would lay bare how I feel to the only One who can help me.

Emerald City is the most emotionally-charged record I have heard since Rosanne Cash's Black Cadillac.  It hurts to listen sometimes.  And yet the beautiful pop music takes some of the sting out of the lyrics.  Give it a listen.  And then read the Psalms for a light to guide you out of the emotional quandary in which Vanderslice leaves you.