Rating: 5/5
Review:
Another excellent album from Jason Isbell
This is another very fine album from Jason Isbell. It was always going to be difficult to follow the superb Southeastern, but think he's done it very well.
The album is typical Isbell: fine, often slightly mournful melodies which get inside you and really speak to you, great chord sequences and intelligent, thoughtful and evocative lyrics. Add to this his very fine singing and guitar work, a very good band and slightly held-back, sympathetic production and you have a very good album indeed.
The material is typical Isbell: the life of the working man, the value of love, the pain of its loss and excoriating self-analysis - with some other, often unusual stories thrown in. He's still doing it brilliantly. The title track, with the repeated line "I don't think of why I'm here where it hurts/ I'm just lucky to have the work..." set to an emotional, rather beautiful tune and chords couldn't be anyone else - possibly other than Springsteen, whose Nebraska-ish echoes can also be heard in the excellent Speed Trap Town. Isbell's music is his own, though, and often more hauntingly beautiful and less polemically driven than Springsteen's.
This is another album of quite varied but consistently excellent songs, from the quietly lovely, very original love song in Flagship to the more rocky 24 Frames and the wonderfully evocative Hudson Commodore (which brought Neil Young's Unknown Legend to the back of my mind). There's perhaps nothing here with the extraordinary emotional punch of Elephant, nor the piercing evocation of loneliness of Ride With Me, but it's very fine stuff nonetheless.
I only discovered Jason Isbell with Southeastern, which I thought was a truly exceptional album with a quite extraordinary quality of music and especially of lyrics. This is in the same league, I think, even if it's not quite such a towering masterpiece - which are, let's face it, are very rare things. It's a really good album of great material, superbly performed and produced and very warmly recommended.
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