Our bullet album reviews will now run on Mondays, and the feature will be renamed New Music Mondays in the new year. – KJC
We are thankful for a few of this week’s new releases.
Melissa Carper
Audiotree Live [EP]
Drawing mostly from AotY contender Borned in Ya, this set foregrounds Carper’s inimitable voice and leans hard into the cabaret elements peppered throughout that brilliant record. Tack this onto a playlist with the original for an ad hoc Deluxe Edition.
Molly Brandt
American Saga
Brandt throws countless disparate genre signifiers at the wall, and it’s a testament to her skill that damn near all of them stick. “Sunup,” to pick just one example, is a killer hybrid of alt-country x dancepunk. And her voice can truly sing anything.
Shawn Mendes
Shawn
Having zero attachment to his prior music, I’m less interested in the career narrative than in the folklore of this. It’s not on that level– the production’s too greige and genre averse, the writing too cagey and vague– but it’s a quite lovely effort in the Kahan vein.
Hudson Westbrook
Hudson Westbrook [EP]
Admittedly, the cover had me steeled for more of Every Music Row Guy Who’s Styled Exactly Like This. But this debut isn’t that: It’s more centered on the Zach Bryan – Wyatt Flores axis. Super promising songcraft and genre smarts throughout. Needs a vocal coach, stat.
Yonder Mountain String Band
Nowhere Next
This one impresses for how they capture the breakneck energy of their live shows without overindulging in the kinds of jam-band digressions that just don’t ever work on studio albums. They remain one of the finest bands in modern ‘grass.
Clem Snide
Oh Smokey
His writing has outgrown the corrosive irony that sometimes undercut his early work without sacrificing his gallows humor or distinct POV. Here, he uses death as a jumping off point for one of his most diverse– and most tuneful– collections of narratives.
Brooks & Dunn
Reboot II
2019’s Reboot wasn’t great, but it didn’t show contempt for the duo’s deep catalog the way this grotesquerie does. Earls/Leicester and Kingfish Ingram are lone survivors of an abattoir of Music Row’s most problematic and least capable (Wallen, Moroney, Zeiders, Green, Tenpenny.)
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