The Ridge

The talent, confident and imagination on display throughout this album makes it a must-listen, a chance to let your mind wander and to lose yourself in an incredible plangency of strings.

[The final track is] less antic and virtuoso than the earlier tracks, but a good deal more touching. Elsewhere Neufeld jets off for the stratosphere, technical dexterity gleaming in a rarified, surgically clean space. Here she sinks into a rich, loamy here and now, luxuriating in slow exploration of certainties.

What Neufeld shows again in The Ridge is that the violin and her superbly expressive playing is more than enough to make for a great record but it shows this at the expense of making the other elements thrown in occasionally feel superfluous or underdeveloped by contrast.

Concerned at least as much with timbre as with rhythm, structure, or emotional tone--and none of these is neglected here--the composite is perpetually stimulating, exploiting repetition and expectation, both in time and texture. Album structure is carefully considered as well, with the drums vanishing for the final two tracks.

Though compositionally The Ridge feels less exploratory that Neufield’s previous work, it is still a moving document of her engaging, virtuosic playing.