Nathan Evans Fox leads with a five star effort.
49 Winchester
Change of Plans
If they’re looking to make further mainstream inroads, this ace record should do the trick. A more polished version of what’s always made them such a distinctive outfit, this walks a fine line between “sell out” accusations from assholes and embracing big ambitions.
Krislyn Arthurs
Honky Tonk PhD
Worth pointing out that only the title track here actually sounds like Honky Tonk; the rest is a polished brand of modern country rock in a BrOs, A. McBryde vein. She has the pipes to carry that off, too, and with an IYKYK eye for local color in her songwriting.
Whitehorse
All I Want is All of It
As before, some of this duo’s irony scans as just a little too arch, which brings into question the jokes and satirical nods that actually do hit. No faulting their musicianship, though, as they still know their way around a melody and a killer hook.
Ryan Bingham and the Texas Gentlemen
They Call Us the Lucky Ones
The combination of his sharpest lyrics and most weathered singing make for what’s handily his best work in over a decade. The TX Gentlemen fully earn their credit here, too, with crackerjack performances that understand where Bingham is in this moment.
Nathan Evans Fox
Heirloom
Each of these 12 extraordinary songs touches, either outright or obliquely, on the peculiar tension of “gettin’ above your raisin’,” when your birthright falls somewhere on the Venn Diagram of southern x Appalachian x poor. And each does so with Fox’s rare gifts of wit, intellect, and compassion, along with his mastery of frugal language. He minces nary a syllable here and says exactly what he means to say.
Taken as a whole, though, what makes Heirloom so extraordinary is how Fox ultimately rejects that “gettin’ above” ethos in its entirety.
These are songs about embracing, powerfully and without apology, the beauty and sources of pride in that “raisin’,” and how it’s possible to be smart, to make space at your table, and to refine your bullshit detector without being obligated to perpetuate generational shame and trauma.
The specificity of Fox’s references– Sevin Dust, brainworms as fishing bait, nascar retaining walls, TN Gov. Bill Lee– bring an authoritative POV to his narratives, while he wrestles with questions of when to sit with something difficult and when to punch up.
Ultimately, it’s about nuance.
Heirloom, both aesthetically and thematically, is about how damaging it is to view things– country music, “red states,” and so on– as a monolith, because so much of real value gets lost to those broad strokes.
It’s an album about putting in the effort to understand other people and to give a damn about their stories, on the hope that they’ll do the same for you and the people you love. In a time of such deep distress for so many, that message makes Heirloom something to treasure, indeed.
Shakey Graves
Fondness, Etc.
He remains a gifted musician and arranger but a marginal lyricist and singer. Which is to say that the essential tracks on this latest collection are the instrumentals (“Suddenly,” in particular) which impress for his mastery of shape and movement.
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