Terry Blade has this week’s strongest entry.
Adam Melchor
The Diary of Living
A modern singer-songwriter who can actually sing? The quality of his vocal skill increasingly distinguishes Melchor from his peers, and this travelogue of past relationships gives him ample opportunity for his best singing to date.
Kinky Friedman
Poet of Motel 6
A lovely, pensive send-off for an inimitable talent. A posthumous release can sometimes result in unearned gravitas, but that isn’t the case here: The songwriting brings the poetry implied by the album title as Friedman creates characters nearly as singular as he.
Terry Blade
Chicago Kinfolk: The Juke Joint Blues
Give or take Adia Victoria, no one is doing more captivating work with Blues formalism these days than Blade. This works as brilliantly as a concept album about historical precedent as it does as an example of the vitality of the form itself. He’s extraordinary.
HARDY
COUNTRY! [EP]
A response to criticism that he’s more closely aligned with his (also terrible!) brand of modern NÜ-METAL!, this plays as a doth-protest-too-much doubling-down on the notion that country can and should only ever be this exact set of lifestyle and identity signifiers.
So it’s as easy to reject this on philosophical grounds as it is to reject it for being so bereft of actual ideas that it name-checks “A Country Boy Can Survive” on 40% of its songs or for the fact that his singing is never once worth the scar tissue he’s accumulated on his adenoids. Just awful.
Samantha Crain
gumshoe
Daresay it’s her finest album to date. There’s a near perfect alignment between the lo-fi indie-rock influences and Crain’s knotty narrative style. As ever, there’s power in a Choctaw woman staking a claim to “Americana,” and Crain really owns that power on this set.
Jade Turner
Breathe
Turner’s massive, soulful voice carries a collection of songs polished enough to suggest what the country mainstream could sound like in a world where said mainstream actually made space for an indigenous woman to contribute to the genre.
Hayden Coffman
Love and a Heartbreak
Some of the most pedestrian beats ever committed to record on purpose, mixed too loudly under poorly half-sung clichés and stereotypes about women who don’t scan as human. Clearly, there’s an undiscerning audience for this, but it’s just Wallen knockoffs all the way down.
Ron Pope
American Man, American Music
Of the current generation of country-folk troubadours on this axis, Pope remains the best singer, and the clarity of his emotional expression further distinguishes him. Some truly first-rate songwriting on this set should further elevate his profile.
Maddie & Tae
Love & Light
A few too many tracks with ill-fitting hip-hop beats that don’t fit their natural twanginess, and a few too many tracks that have been out for ages already, but this is mostly another winner that’s packed w clever songwriting, massive pop-country hooks.
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