Tuelo leads this week’s batch of new releases.
Tuelo
Regarding My Heart
A fascinating and compelling album that’s elevated by its unusual structure. The arrangements here are much poppier and more slick than expected, but her skill with conventional folk idioms still shines through. And she remains one of the finest singers in music today.
Josiah and the Bonnevilles
Country Covers II
As with last year’s first edition, the song selection here shows an impressive range of influences and current ear-to-the-ground taste, and the arrangements showcase a solid technical skill. But I can’t get past the sub-Zach Bryan vocal quality.
Bellamy Brothers
Double Dog Dare!
Not sure that I fully trust the affable tone of their state-of-things observations on a few tracks, but this is mostly a pleasant enough listen from this veteran act. The collaborations with Gene Watson and the late K.T. Oslin are legit career highlights.
Jenna Davis
SIKE [EP]
As the voice actor for M3GAN (!), she fully understood the assignment. As a pop-country upstart? She makes the mistake of trying to be “camp” ironically. Her performances telegraph every intention, even when the garish production tries– often– to bury her. A real mess here.
Paul Cauthen
Black On Black
Uneven. A handful of tracks that nod toward hip-hop should’ve been cut for too many reasons to list here, but the tracks that take other big genre swings (“Speaking in Cursive”) or are just unapologetically catchy (“Lavender Jones,” “Innocent”) are pretty damn great.
COMPLETELY off topic–Billboard magazine is releasing a ranking of the Top 100 Country Artists of All Time. I know there is a plethora of love for Patty Loveless on this site; she and Trisha Yearwood are my two favorite country artists of all time. They released nos. 100-76 today; among the more dubious names on the list are Rascal Flatts and Luke Bryan. Patty comes in at no. 84, which is WAY too low. Among those coming in AHEAD of her? Faith Hill and MORGAN WALLEN. Yeah, let that sink in.
A Billboard list is usually based on chart performance, which would make Luke Bryan & Morgan Wallen ahead of Loveless and Yearwood inevitable.
Faith Hill was also way more successful than Loveless and Yearwood at radio and retail, too. I think that Hill even had three No. 1 albums on the all-genre chart.
Billboard has been one of the loudest apologists for Morgan Wallen from the second his drunken, racist video leaked. A lifetime ago, they had a tremendous editorial and critical presence, but that’s long since been replaced by a focus on driving music industry profits.
The best way to conceptualize Billboard nowadays is that they would, without any hesitation, say that Taco Bell makes the *best* Mexican food because Taco Bell makes the *most* Mexican food.
Frankly, I’m surprised they’d put Wallen so low on a list like this, since he’s the current generation’s biggest cash cow.
I was a HUGE fan of Billboard back in the nineties; fantastic publication. I made the mistake of getting a subscription (at a hugely discounted rate) a couple years back; to say it’s a shell of it’s former self is an understatement (despite they’re being several writers still there from their eighties/nineties hey day). I quickly let that sub lapse.