New releases from Caley Watts, Wesko, Graham Barham, Bella White, Charlie Marie, Rodney Atkins, Jackie DeShannon, Jo Dee Messina, Willie Nelson, Old Crow Medicine Show, The Deslondes, and Red Clay Strays in this week’s roundup.
Caley Watts
River’s Daughter
The roots-rock arrangements on this set are hefty enough to meet the power of her singing voice, but they’re a degree or two too conventional for such distinctive songwriting. Watts is another Indigenous woman who foregrounds her heritage in her best narratives.
Wesko
Familiar Things [EP]
Yes, quite, though I’ll say I was pleasantly surprised to yet another one of This Exact Guy bust out a rather heartfelt– if technically dodgy– Springsteen cover at this moment in time and in the country space. Some mettle here, perhaps, but fairly slight.
Graham Barham
Club Country
Zero Stars
Valuable only as a case study of the causal relationship between why Gen Z and Gen Alpha women are choosing to remain single and what’s wrong with their respective generations’ man-children.
He can’t rap. He can’t sing. His grasp of “club” is limited to just the most po-faced, dated 808s. His grasp of “country” is limited to rehashed Bro-era lifestyle signifiers.
His syntax makes me question if I still know what words mean or how different parts of speech work in American English.
In the 22 years I’ve been doing this, I’ve given exactly 3 zero-star album ratings: One that I’ve long said I’d take back, and one that I still fully stand behind.
In terms of the grotesque, by-and-for-those-who-embrace-every-debased-genre-stereotype content and the incomprehensibly inept attempts at music composition and performance, this may very well be the worst album I’ve ever listened to. There’s not one thing he does here that isn’t an affront to art.
“Talkin’ monogram on monogram
And half a gram in her nose
She goes stupid like her mama took Tylenol
Got 20 tattoos, gonna find ’em all
Got a belly button ring with a diamond on
Her body so crazy I climb the walls”
This is how Barham says, “I go bananas for them Dixie Chicks.”
I hope they sue.
There are artists who’ve long since figured out how to blend hip-hop and country. Barham does nothing but engage in abhorrent appropriation of the former and create a vision of the latter where he thinks so little of his audience that he needs to explain an “alright alright alright” reference.
And that’s the problem with this album: The belief that whoever its audience might be aren’t capable of and don’t deserve better than this.
That belief goes a long way toward explaining how we got to this exact moment in the first place. Club Country is a product of cultural rot.
Bella White
A Sign in the Weather
A sharply written collection of songs that highlight White’s gifts as an observer. But the flat affect in her vocal performances here require such heavy lifting that it borders on projection as to what she and her narrators might be thinking. That works against her.
Charlie Marie
Signs
She’s pivoted away from pure trad-country to a more varied aesthetic, which is perfectly attuned to these thoughtful songs, which burrow into feelings of displacement and restlessness during and post Covid lockdown era. She’s using more idiosyncratic vocal phrasing, too.
Rodney Atkins
True South
A triumph of cognitive dissonance. He follows tracks that show outright contempt for anyone not exactly like him with an “it don’t matter where you’re from” invitation (“All Y’all”), insults others for using Auto-Tune when his own adenoidal grunts are obviously tweaked.
Mostly, the blend of cliché-and-product-placement addled songs and cheap-sounding knockoffs of current production trends amount to a collection that reeks of flop-sweat from someone desperate to recapture his fleeting moment of success and who often comes off as angry that his time came and went.
Jackie DeShannon
Girl of Yesterday: Acoustic Folk Demos
:
Yes, she’s an icon of folk and pop songwriting– or she should be– but this set very much sounds like the collection of restored demo recordings it is. Essential for completists, but just a pleasant enough listen for the rest of us.
Jo Dee Messina
Bridges
As wildly uneven an album as I can recall, this careens from mawkishly written, badly AutoTuned, mainstream pandering tracks to… a handful of tracks that are easily the best music of her career? There’s a legitimately great EP to be culled from this messy record.
I could take or leave the song on message, but “The Jesus I Know” is flat-out the best performance she’s ever committed to record. It’s gritty, soulful, controlled, and powerful in ways that I legit believed she was never capable of singing. And the arrangement slaps.
The title track is a multi-week #1 20 years ago or in a timeline that allowed women over 35 to score country radio airplay. It’s fully of a piece with the very best of her peak-era singles.
What a pleasant surprise that, for a few moments, she more than makes good on her nostalgia moment.
Willie Nelson
Dream Chaser
If not quite of the caliber of the pinnacle of his late-late-career run, this is nonetheless as lovely and melancholy as those records. The way he continues to understand how his aged voice works to enhance a song remains a marvel of self-awareness.
Old Crow Medicine Show
Union Made
The pickin’ is as unassailable as ever, and they manifested a miracle in a Jesse Welles collab that I didn’t immediately hate. But they’re at their best with their humanist politics come through narratively, not as a CAPSLOCK thesis statement. This is often too didactic.
The Deslondes
Don’t Let it Die, Vol. 1
It isn’t the depth, it’s the breadth of this band’s talents that is their greatest virtue, and that is showcased perfectly on what’s one of the finest covers albums in a minute. The final three tracks, especially the Shelby Lynne cut, are jaw-droppers. Love this crew.
Red Clay Strays
Grateful
The gap between the quality of their live shows and their recorded performances continues to narrow as they gain confidence in the studio. Here, they sound like the “mature” version of the band Kings Of Leon were on their first two albums but did not turn into themselves.
Which is at least an aesthetic choice that gives them a credibility air when pitted against a faceless Old Dominion or Parmalee, and their POV is less “principled centrist!” than it is just incurious about other people’s interior lives. They clear many low bars, and I don’t begrudge the success.
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