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.
Highest of praise, truly, that the style and the vocal technique are in conversation with early Tami Neilson records: Marie’s classic genre smarts are obvious, and she ties that know-how to a POV that’s thoroughly modern.
A most welcome return after a break from music, and one of the year’s best.
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 run.
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.
What were the other 0 star reviews???
Also – Watching You 2.0 featuring Rodney’s son is nice in theory I guess – performing the song with the son who inspired it. But the son’s vocals are so bad it is laughable. Maybe he is a good singer, but the affectation he uses makes him sound like he has a speech impediment. I saw commenters on reddit saying he does have a speech impediment, but the interview with Rodney that I read said that it is a stylistic choice and he’s trying to sound like Post Malone.
Both were reviews for Slant. One of Faith Hill’s Fireflies, which I maintain is a very poor album but which I’d approach very differently now, and one is John Rich’s Son of a Preacher Man, which was and remains indefensible.
I immediately thought Atkins’ son was just trying to sound like Post Malone. Even with his awful vocals, that’s still one of the least objectionable tracks on that album, though, since it did at least have a decent enough idea behind it.
Still remember that savage review of Fireflies lol. Mississippi Girl aside, I still thought it was her best album since It Matters To Me (*ducks for cover*). I will say, I miss first-two-albums Faith Hill; alot of potential that went sideways when they shellaced the character out of her vocals and she went “pop diva”
I mean, that album’s certified 5x platinum and earned her fourth nomination for Best Country Album at the Grammys (with “Like We Never Loved at All” winning her fifth overall Grammy), so you definitely weren’t alone at the time or even now.
I agree with you on Faith Hill. I think she really did work best as a Tillis/Loveless type. And that’s not me being biased toward neotraditionalism. I’d say the exact opposite thing about her husband.
Woof, sorry you had to listen to that Graham Barham monstrosity, Jonathan. Thank God for Charlie Marie, Willie, and others who put at some palate-soothing material.
I’m curious if/how you would give some thoughts on the new Brad Paisley songs coming out. I know this is more of a steady stream of songs from a while back he never released than a cohesive album, which makes it difficult to delineate when to offer some thoughts. So far, I’m liking what I’m hearing for the most part.
On one hand, I’m still waiting for an acknowledgement of that very, very good Son Of The Mountain project from a couple of years back that he and his new label have tried to memory-hole. Paisley has the goods for one hell of a late-career artistic pivot if he wants to go that route, and I’d love to see him talked about in a way similar to how we all talk about, say, Lee Ann Womack now.
The tracks he’s released are strong, for sure: As uneven as I have found him over the years, the collected “Tacklebox” is closely aligned to his “Time Well Wasted” era in terms of quality control. But I’m also of the mind that “Truck Still Works” should’ve been a comeback smash.
…sounds like brad paisley is warming up some leftovers from his debut album days – in the most pleasant fashion. “someone else’s arms”, with that delightful touch by the incredible ms. lambert (is there anything country the lambert touch does not elevate to a whole other level?) may not be up to the lastest in communication technology but what a tongue-in-the-cheek – or elsewhere – cheatin’ situation they are creating there. “helen back” = young brad’s back. “overnight low” is classic paisley humor – a christmas song in early summer. only problem with this concept so far: it’s a testimony of stalling, kinda. but who says, stalling can’t have its moments?
charlie marie’s “sign” could be some from above almost. terrific and satisfying in a double whopper kinda way – with extra fries and bacon. most wholesome sentimental bliss. rhyming montana and red bandana may not have been such a task, fair enough. but boy, how she makes you miss your long-hair-days with that one.
I’m trying to hold off on longer or more focused Paisley commentary until we see if he collates this “Tacklebox” into a more singular project. At the moment, it’s not on the level of Vince Gill Fatigue by volume, but it makes it at least a little bit difficult to engage with fully, not knowing where he’s really going with it all.
Never had long hair, but I definitely appreciate Charlie Marie’s vibe.
Alright, look. Although I’m a hidebound traditionalist and will own that, I do find a fair amount of pop-country listenable, even good depending on the era.
But there isn’t a single redeeming quality to that Graham Barham garbage. How? How did that ever even see the light of day?
He has 1.6M monthly listeners on Spotify.
Jason Isbell has 1.2M.
Now, there are plenty of other quality artists whose numbers are exponentially greater– Ella Langley’s sitting on 30M; Kane Brown’s at 11.4M; Turnpike’s at 2.7M– but that’s a number I certainly cannot fathom or justify.