Peter Himmelman
by Marc Hirsh
Peter Himmelman
by Marc Hirsh
originally published in Amplifier, November-December 2005
There’s only so much fucking nobility that a
person can
take, and Peter Himmelman’s first career retrospective does the singer
no
favors by piling on one deeply felt ode to the resilience of the human
spirit
after the other. It’s not that Himmelman can’t be an engaging
performer;
several of his albums, notably 1991’s excellent From
Strength To Strength, offer up a probing take on his quest to
locate grace in what he acknowledges (in a song of the same name) is an
imperfect world. But what they have, which Mission
Of My Soul lacks, is balance. Suffused with almost mystical
overtones (even
otherwise straightforward love songs like “7 Circles,” “With You” and
the live
version of “Closer” deal with the spiritual underpinnings of romance,
rather
than the more mundane facts of the profane world), the album is
relentless in its
quest to embiggen the smallest man. Actually, it’s women that get (and,
somewhat more disconcertingly, need) the most substantial ennoblement,
as
Himmelman learns Valuable Life Lessons from a homeless woman (“Beneath
The
Damage And The Dust”) and someone with Lou Gehrig’s Disease (“Woman
With The
Strength Of 10,000 Men”). Mission Of My
Soul finds Himmelman caring so much that you almost feel like you
don’t
have to.