Joshua Ray Walker leads the pack with his best album to date.
Joshua Ray Walker
Stuff
Tremendous. He executes the central conceit– pondering one’s own mortality in terms of the objects we leave behind– with such confidence, wit, and vitality. And the range of country styles he embraces here highlight the breadth of his talents. A career-best by a modern titan.
Megan Moroney
Am I Okay? Tour (Live)
An exercise in wholly unearned confidence. She can’t sing these songs in the studio, and her wooden stage banter and, yes, badly off-key-on-every-single-one-of-these-tracks performances are beyond hope. No one should settle for someone so actively bad at this.
And I’m just done with this.
To say nothing of the artists who aren’t actively upholding every problematic element of Music Row politics, hell, there is a surfeit of young blonde white women who can write and sing her off the table. I’m judging anyone who tries to say this music sounds good. No.
Charlie Collins
Nightwriter
Whenever she wrote these songs, she continues to develop into a captivating and idiosyncratic writer. The sound here is the least straightforwardly “country” of any of her albums to date, but this set makes it clear she’s finding a lane all of her own. Good stuff.
Ricky Chilton
Horsepower
As with the debut he dropped in January, I’m tapping the “Irony is Corrosive” sign, but damned if he can’t construct a catchy AF tune. As a character study, the album works best as an example of “country” as a type of drag, with a good ratio of jokes that land.
Clover County
Finer Things
Self-identified “bootgaze,” and I cannot in any way improve on that description of the exact POV and vibe of her work on this debut. Some of the writing scans as a bit too workshopped, but that will surely improve with time, and what a foundation to build on here.
Dasha
Anna [EP]
“One hit wonder” doesn’t have to be a pejorative, but her one hit wasn’t really significant outside of the fact that it happened at all, and she simply hasn’t demonstrated the talent or presence to make more of an impact. Its emptiness is the only thing notable about this EP.
Jeff Tweedy
Twilight Override
As a middle-aged white dude who was big into alt-country in his teens and twenties, I know I’m supposed to be the exact demo for this. And there are some terrific songs here (“Enough” is an earworm). But my God, this project did not need to sprawl over 3 albums.
Mae Estes
Mae Estes [EP]
A dynamite singer– her tone gives early Womack– who’s been kicking around for ages, Estes shines brightest when she lets her thoughtful phrasing carry a song. And the songs here are all fine enough, though there are too few for an overall throughline. Full album when?
The fact that every mediocre white man with a sleazestache and a flat-brimmed ballcap can get a full album to market while a woman like Estes gets a couple of EPs over the course of nearly a decade– and it’s far worse for POC, obvs– is such a damning reflection of where Music Row still stands.
Payton Smith
The Bridge
Another Wallen acolyte, rather than another Pledge Week also-ran. Of note, when he stops affecting Wallen’s off-putting combo of nasal + rasp vocal style, Smith has a pretty great singing voice. Beyond that, the songs and style are all indistinguishable, mid radio fodder.
Bones Owens
Best Western
The country-blues aesthetic here makes for a good time, even if it’s perhaps a bit too spit-shined to give the truly underclass vibe Owens seems to be going for. The songs that go hardest for Western in the “spaghetti” sense fare the best on this solid effort.
Blaine Bailey
Indian Country
His best yet, this finds Bailey accepting that his terrific singing voice isn’t one that’s meant for grit or bluster; the 90s country style here doesn’t push him in a more ill-fitting direction. As ever, he’s at his best when he leans hard into Indigenous heritage.
Priscilla Block
Things You Didn’t See
A sight better than the just-dreadful EP she dropped last year, but this still lacks a clear identity in any way that matters. She clears the low bar of singing better than many of her peers, but the writing and aesthetic are barely distinguishable from standard Music Row fare.
Cole Chaney
In the Shadow of the Mountain
This rising Kentucky artist continues to impress. Recalls SteelDrivers for how he puts blunt force to otherwise traditional Appalachian sounds; this isn’t revolutionary so much as resurrecting an overlooked alt-country vein. When the songs finally match the style, look out.
I went to the Iowa State Fair on a Saturday in August and Megan Moroney was the grandstand act. As I surveyed the sold-out crowd waiting in line, it reminded me how powerful effective marketing can be as more than half of the crowd was females between the ages of 13 and 25, even in the modern era of media fragmentation. Nashville has peddled us the insufferable mediocrity of Moroney and it worked out every bit as well as imagined. I’m still occasionally astonished at how low people allow their standards to be.
And so much of that demographic pull is driven by bought-and-paid-for manipulation of social media and advertising algorithms. Music Row knows– correctly– that they had overlooked the Southern public university (“Bama Rush”) demographic as a source of the money and white supremacy they most value, and that’s exactly why they’re shoveling money into the careers of Moroney and Bailey Zimmerman and their ilk.
…half reply to mark of the vikings (good game on sunday), half add-on: let’s not be too harsh on ms. moroney. clearly, her vocals and her stage presence/moves still leave consideralbe room for improvement – which one could see as a good thing in the sense that she may get better over time (best case). however, when it comes to songwriting and conveying what she’s been and done during her last five years of young adulthood – a college girl almost accidentally getting to chase that neon rainbow – she delivers very convincingly, and at a level that is superior to many of her peers. she came on in her own special way – with barely no dues paid in country music and performance – but she showed guts (i don’t think it was desperation) going out on these big stages and perform. especially, daring to go out on stage even with the seasoned show horse chesney, who liked her a lot. this could have gone so wrong – i mean more than that dismissible live album. he also saw something special in taylor swift early on. guess, one could give him the benefit of the doubt when it comes to spotting talent. her two albums i’ve been ranking among the best of the year in their respective years of release. i see her as a case where judgement may be best left to her demographic perhaps – and not to us boomers, who remember ronstadt and ms. mandrell on stage.
…indeed, allowing mae estes only eps is just sad. certainly one of the biggest vocal talents among the freshwomen. can’t remember not having liked anything from her in the last few years. perhaps, her time is just coming with more (younger) people starting to enjoy more traditional country sounds again.
…priscilla block, whom i had the pleasure to interview when she burst on the scene with “block party” is another point in case that there is an audience out there consisting of girls and young women, who can relate and enjoy the themes that she or moroney – as well as carter faith can rather enjoyably – come up with these days pretty big time. ms. block is actually a very switched on young woman with a fine voice and quite some determination. i’m not fully through with her new offering, but the people resonsible for the production should have left some more room for variety and nuance (at least in the first half of it), was my initial impression.
…dasha? tons of star appeal and sass. more of a test than a testimony her effort here though.
…for mr. tweedy i save for a moment when i can give him my full attention. anything else i’d consider disrespectful.
…charlie collins is a new name to me – but someone, who comes up with an album cover like that – no trees, no truck, no flanels – is inclined to spark some of my intersts.
Walter Chaw has been the finest and most important film critic for the last twenty five years. And something he has said far too often is that, oddly, “it’s for kids!” is only used as an excuse or a defense for lower standards when it comes to works of entertainment and popular culture. The plot is full of truck-sized holes? A character’s depiction is vaguely racist? Voice actors were hired because of their name and not because they can deliver a line convincingly? Who cares! It’s for kids! They won’t know any better or care either way!
For most everything else, “it’s for kids” means heightened regulatory standards around production, safety metrics, and quality. For as much as right-leaning folks scream about the supposed Nanny State, it brought us positives like car seats that actually keep children alive, lead-free paint, and both the labor and age of consent laws that some folks here in the US are trying to get rolled back. And hell, I’m not going to argue with the Crunchy Moms or the MAHA movement that getting a bunch of artificial chemical food dyes out of kid-marketed breakfast cereals and candies is a good idea.
But kids aren’t stupid, and they shouldn’t have to settle for something of inferior quality just because it’s been forced onto the market by a record label that’s paying huge sums of money for preferential placement on music streaming platforms. The Zoomers and Gen Alpha kids deserve better than someone who is such a poor technical singer that all the ProTools in Nashville can’t get her on pitch in the studio, let alone in a live performance, and whose entire catalog is about punching down. And there are so many superior options– even among, as I said, conventionally “hot” young blonde white women.
So It isn’t a matter of “guts.” It’s entitlement and privilege and a whole lot of people who look at her like one of those old Looney Tunes when someone’s pupils turn into dollar signs and their eyes bug out of their skull.
And no one is more responsible for lowering the bar for actual vocal talent in country music than Kenny Chesney. No one. So his taste and skill could not be a less persuasive counterargument, honestly.
I do feel old most days, but, for the record, I’m officially still in the Millennial generational bracket, not a Boomer.
Clearly, Moroney found an untapped niche in the marketplace and seized upon it. Kudos to her for capturing lightning in a bottle I guess. I still think it’s a distressing sign of the times that a) only two or three women are allowed to be on the charts; and b) Moroney gets to be one of them.
As someone who gravitates to female singers far more than the males, it’s a little disheartening that the genre has a two/maybe three “limit” as far as mainstream country radio goes (probably why I listen to full albums as opposed to anything on the radio dial, the exception being certain Sirius XM channels). I haven’t listened to Moroney’s live record, but I have listened to her first two studio albums and it’s definitely perplexing that this woman would be anointed as one of those two or three females country radio thinks deserves the airwave space. I’ll admit, I don’t think she’s the worst singer I’ve ever heard–Swift eventually learned how to carry a tune after being atrocious for at least two albums, maybe three–but the term “acquired taste” was created with this girl in mind. Granted, “acquired taste” is certainly a relative term–I remember back in the eighties, the morning hosts from one of the Top 40 stations here in Altanta were debating a then-peak K.T. Oslin, with one co-host singing her praises and the other truly perplexed as how anyone thought this woman had an appealing vocal instrument (for the record, as much as I like a decent amount of her music, I find Miranda Lambert’s voice a major acquired taste, same with nineties star Deana Carter). And that’s where I land with Moroney, an acquired taste for sure, and frankly not a particularly “pleasant” listened at that (Carly Pearce gets knocked for her limited voice, but I find it appealing in it’s limited scope and think she uses it with a fair amount of economy). So yeah, I think I’m gonna skip Moroney and listen to Hummingbird again instead.
Your Deana Carter comparison is an excellent one. I liked “Strawberry Wine” because it was a good song that she pulled off despite her vocal shortcomings. Just about everything beyond that was fingernails on a chalkboard for me. Moroney is similar in her limitations but without any songs I’ve found appealing thus far.
I’m no expert on what does and doesn’t constitute a great vocalist but I’ve also scratched my head on why Carly Pearce gets ribbed for weak vocals. Far as I’m concerned, you’d need a special neutron telescope on loan from NASA to even be able to see Pearce’s vocal talent from where Carter and Moroney live. Good idea to listen to her “Hummingbird” album. It’s extremely underrated.
Carter’s voice always bugged me, but I went a little further with her than you did, as Strawberry Wine was never a favorite of mine to begin with (despite loving Matraca Berg); I liked the other Berg co-write from that album (We Danced Anyway) better, as well as the excellent Count Me In. And she had a few good songs off her third record I’m Just a Girl, too (Goodbye Train, another Berg composition, wasn’t a single but should’ve been).
I’ll echo the love for Hummingbird as well. Carly recognizes her strengths and weaknesses and plays into them well. I didn’t mind Moroney’s debut album, Lucky, but was pretty disinterested in her most recent one. I don’t find her voice to be all that great but I’ve also heard worse.
Pearce has become one of my favorite mainstream country artists of the last five years or so; both Hummingbird and 29: Written in Stone are sublime, and I even liked a fair amount of her second, self-titled record (which skewed a little more toward country-pop than the last two but still has some good songs on it). It’s too bad she’s pretty much fallen out of favor at country radio; you could do a blind pick of any number of Pearce songs off those last two records and they’d be better than anything Moroney or even awards magnet Lainey Wilson has sent to radio in the last three years.
Agree with everything you said. Carly will be the first to admit her second album was a misfire because the suits were directing her toward a soulless country-pop that wasn’t in her wheelhouse. As you said though, there were still a few really strong entries on it.
“29: Written in Stone” and “Hummingbird” are both masterful, chockful of songs that would have been hits in a less pathetic era for commercial country. I think Carly’s biggest struggle is that she excels in ballads which radio isn’t in the market for while her uptempo stuff doesn’t quite land as well and/or seems dated. I’ll be curious if she can pull off a comeback with her next album, but I’m skeptical.
It feels like the mainstream part of the genre is uninterested in the female perspective unless it’s wrapped up in a sea of mediocrity (even Wilson seems to have issues getting airplay for her more recent singles). It’s disheartening how far mainstream country has fallen since the nineties, when it felt like literally dozens of women were getting not only critical kudos, but significant airplay and commercial success to boot. Much as I hate to say it, I feel like Pearce’s time has passed, and absolutely through no fault of her own; she’s more than held up her end of the creative bargain (unlike any number of her peers, both female and male). The whole enterprise is disheartening as hell.
I still have no idea why Megan Moroney and Lainey Wilson stuck when Priscilla Block and Ingrid Andress didn’t.
It’s a little easier for me to see why Ingrid Andress didn’t stick even before her national anthem meltdown. Her first single was one of the best songs of the 2010s but outside of that it required a herculean suspension of disbelief to categorize her music as “country”. Certainly contemporary country radio is way too conservative to go that far into left field.
Re: Several folks…
Pearce is an interesting case in that she is a poor technical singer, but she and her production and engineering teams are able to do enough takes / use enough pitch-correction technology so that her studio recordings at least sound fine. Her albums are terrific, and I’ve reviewed them as such here!
Moroney, in contrast, is still audibly off-pitch on her studio albums, and every live performance I’ve ever heard from her makes it clear that she has such limited technical skill that being a quarter-pitch flat is probably the best anyone can get out of her.
The late, great Whitney Houston addressed this a generation ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qRXAfRA4P4