Kathleen Edwards and Band Loula are the clear winners this week.
MaRynn Taylor
MaRynn
Most of this was written while opening for Kelsea Ballerini. As someone who believes Ballerini has gotten exponentially better over time, that this sounds indistinguishable, right down to her vocal timbre, from “The First Time” is not a compliment. But let’s see where she goes.
Russell Dickerson
Famous Back Home
If you say so. The most anonymous B-lister in an era overstuffed with anonymous B-listers doth protest too much on a collection of the most middling modern country hack-work I’ve heard all year. Country has a long and storied history of this forgettable radio fodder.
Kathleen Edwards
Billionaire
A collection that dials-up everything that she’s always done well: The lived-in singing, the bite in her songwriting, the aesthetic that sits comfortably at the intersection of country, folk, rock. The bitterness of some of these songs is tempered by wisdom.
Edwards has been through some shit, and the measured perspective she brings to her writing, no matter the narrative voice she adopts highlights her empathy. The tone shift from “Say Goodbye, Tell No One” to “Need a Ride” is masterful stuff, and Isbell’s production does right by her at every turn.
BigXThaPlug
I Hope You’re Happy
There are so many other artists who are operating in this genre-upending space at a level that, simply put, is better than what he’s doing here. Gatekeepers are apoplectic in the predictably racist ways because the sun still rises in the east.
What this album and its embrace by so many big-name Music Row acts lays bare is something that’s, frankly, been obvious for years: Country’s A-listers have pretty terrible, pedestrian taste in hip-hop.
The issue isn’t that a guy like BigXThaPlug can’t belong in country; it’s that the album’s mid.
The Woods
Nowhere is Somewhere
In terms of the quality of their singing and songwriting, they’re closer to an updated Little Big Town than an updated Lady [Redacted], so that’s going in their favor. If they get some mainstream traction, I wouldn’t object, even if this is still a bit too MOR for my liking.
John Fogerty
Legacy: The Creedence Clearwater Revival Years (John’s Version)
The thing about the Taylor’s Versions is that the work she’s put into her singing paid off with many performances that improved upon the originals. The material here is all classic, obvs, but there’s nothing here that is an essential new reading.
The Band Loula
Sweet Southern Summer [EP]
A POV that captures the uniquely southern tension between embracing traditions and rejecting the judgment and limits of those same traditions, set to arrangements that foreground twangy instruments in harder-edged modern country, via John Osborne’s ace production.
The power and harmony work in their singing recalls The Civil Wars at their peak, too: Logan Simmons’ throaty growls and languid phrasing are a wonder.
In a better timeline, this catapults them right onto the mainstream A-list. It’s certainly one of the strongest Music Row debuts in a minute.
…to all these “naturals”, who believe that standing – or sitting like aron andras for example – with an acoustic guitar in a green and hilly landscape appears to come across real country take note of the clip to “can’t please ’em all” of that duo with the slightly pretentious yet so sticky name.
marynn taylor – congrats to whoever, who came up with that name suggestion indeed – may be geeting somewhere (although i doubt it), but where’s the fun trying to mould someone into a priscilla block just without the big personality, voice and sass of one of my not so secret young blonde favorites.