Gillian Welch’s Time (The Revelator) at 20: A timeless masterpiece of apocalyptic country

Gillian Welch’s third album, Time (The Revelator), was released 20 years ago this week. That’s jarring on a number of levels.

First of all, it never really left my rotation. I still think of it as new music. There’s this weird compression of time in the internet era. In 2001, music from 1981 sounded a lot older, right? Now it’s as though time is curved instead of linear, we can access new or old music as we wish with the press of a button, it’s all the same, and anything released after this curvature started taking place — the White Stripes, OutKast, Animal Collective — is still contemporary (and always will be).

So Time (speaking of time) doesn’t sound even slightly dated — except in the ways that it wants to sound dated, of course. There’s the weird displacement of its neotraditional country, folk, blues and gospel. It still sounds new and fresh but it also sounds a hundred years old.

Then there’s the haunted quality of its sound, the perfect match for its dark, visionary themes. This droning, minimalist, even dubby feel that makes it sound almost futurist, in the way dub reggae does (also despite its own traditionalism), like country music echoing in the corridors of an abandoned space station. I often follow up Time with ambient electronic…