album review: 'white trash revelry' by adeem the artist

I’m going to start this review with a complaint: i really hate how a lot of mainstream publications seem to write off December when it comes to assembling year-end lists. Yes, they normally tack it onto the following year, but I’ve also seen the month wind up roundly ignored altogether and in a year where at my last count there’s at least three serious album of the year contenders dropping this December, it’s legit jarring to notice such an obvious systemic flaw!

Now to be fair, I can imagine that if you’re not in the know about indie country, you might have missed this one: I first covered Adeem The Artist last year for their fantastic project Cast Iron Pansexual, but they’ve been active in the Bandcamp scene since the early 2010s, quietly building some groundswell. But you can make the argument that Cast Iron Pansexual was the breakthrough beyond just indie country - a lot of well-deserved critical acclaim, getting signed by Thirty Tigers, and after running a short fundraising campaign was able to afford more robust recording and production than their previous, very homespun work. That did have me a bit cautious - sometimes an artist gets a budget and doesn’t know how to use it effectively - but Adeem The Artist was always most noteworthy for me as a songwriter, and the first two singles had me convinced that we could be in for something very special. So what did we get with White Trash Revelry?

…let me dispense with the formalities: yes, this album is goddamn excellent, the natural extension of so much of what I loved on Cast-Iron Pansexual but with a budget to bring forth warmer, more robust arrangements that Adeem The Artist takes to with aplomb without sacrificing wit or firepower. It’s one of the best country albums of 2022, easily… but is it better than their last project? It’s an interesting comparison, and personally I think some of the finer, weirder details that made Cast-Iron Pansexual such an idiosyncratic release have been smoothed over for a wider audience. But at the same time it’s also more refined and expansive and accessible, an aesthetic tweaking that doesn’t make for a worse album, just a different one, albeit not quite as self-contained.

And this leads to an interesting conversation because the sound has changed: there was an intimate and brittle feel to Cast Iron Pansexual that does show up on a few cuts here like ‘Middle Of A Heart’ and ‘My America’ and some of the wonderful touches of subtle sound design show up again here, like how the drums slip into ‘Middle Of The Heart’ sounding so deep and martial. But there’s definitely less of it this time - you’re not going to get something so wonderfully strange as ‘Reclaim My Name’, which is what happens when you go from smaller-stakes Bandcamp production to larger stages and songs that feel like they’d go over better in a live setting. It does feel like a change and one that’s geared to make Adeem The Artist more tuneful and accessible… but they take it in stride with more swagger and energy, you could dance to a decent number of these cuts! There’s a real bouncy honky tonk and country bluegrass energy to ‘Run This Town’ and ‘Going To Hell’ complete with fiddles and banjos, and Adeem The Artist brings a lot of raucous energy to bear! Hell, there’s even a country rock timbre that cuts across the chugging ‘Heritage of Arrogance’ with the rougher vocal pickup or the bluesy acoustics of ‘Redneck, Unread Hicks’ which Adeem The Artist handles effectively - the one place where it doesn’t quite hit the same chord is ‘Baptized In Well Spirits’ - the fiddle sounds terrific, don’t get me wrong, but the hook is a shade clunky and doesn’t quite land the impact for which I was hoping.

But the album isn’t all ass-kicking either, even though it was nice to discover that Adeem The Artist can deliver - they’ve got a tender side and a knack for romantic intimacy that plays just as well with the brighter, warmer palette, and ‘For Judas’ playfully balances the romantic transgression amazingly well, especially opposite those pianos. Then there’s ‘Painkillers And Magic’, more acoustic and homespun but bringing in gospel elements for the outro in a powerful way, which also comes through on the opener ‘Carolina’ with all of that pedal steel. Although what might be a sneaky deep cut favourite of mine is ‘Books & Records’ - the warm acoustics against a more conventional chord structure, the understated groove - the consistently well-balanced low-end and basslines are phenomenal across this thing, I love that attention to detail - and just how warm this album feels, so easy to revisit. That’s one thing where accessibility is a boon, and plays to Adeem The Artist’s sense of humour and camaraderie - where points of Cast Iron Pansexual could almost get uncomfortably intimate, the balance here is better realized, and that makes it endlessly replayable. And considerably more catchy as well - in terms of pure songcraft these are some of the best Adeem The Artist has ever put together!

But a big part of that is still the songwriting, and this is where Adeem The Artist shines - the writing was always the best part of their last album and it’s just as true here, especially in the moral ambiguity and wide-angle framing. The most obvious example last time was ‘I Wish You Would Have Been A Cowboy’, directly addressing the impacts that Toby Keith’s music had in the 2000s, but where the edge came was as a fan who knew the music and artist as well, and that willingness to give grace but realize that it comes with higher stakes creates a lot of tension in the right way. Take ‘Heritage Of Arrogance’, which seeks to target how whiteness is portrayed in the American South, how binaristic it can be between the Klan and the Black Panthers, but as an adult they can realize framing it as two sides of a coin versus systemic racism egged on by evangelical religion can distort the conversation, with a real desire to do the difficult work of dismantling a bad system, and ‘Going To Hell’ takes it further by slyly flipping pieces of old music legend around Robert Johnson and ‘The Devil Went Down To Georgia’ that conveniently sidesteps the reality of how white kids really discovered the blues. Or take ‘Middle Of A Heart’, an album standout that reckons with guns and the pipeline of recruiting kids to the military and patriotism and I love how balanced the song is, between a genuine desire to fight for one’s country, but a serious reckoning of what you’d have to do or become in the process.

And it’s that persistent sense of empathy and a willingness to challenge an enemy distinction that makes Adeem The Artist’s writing so very humanistic: ‘Redneck, Unread Hicks’ is the obvious example in challenging stereotypes of rural communities that are often way more progressive, accepting, and willing to organize than a liberal media will frame them, a great balance alongside the messy and painful family settings of ‘Carolina’ and the deeply rooted backwoods evangelicalism of ‘Painkillers & Magic’ that reminds me a lot of that last Pony Bradshaw album, but what will likely get more attention is ‘My America’. Framed as something of a response to Aaron Lewis’ ‘Am I The Only One’, it’s not an explicit condemnation so much as trying to dig into the lonely mess of misinformation, fear, confusion, and alienation of middle aged white guys who see the world changing around them without much of a clear idea where they belong; it’s not letting Lewis or indeed any of them off the hook but shows an understanding of their point of view that’s more complex than simply calling them the enemy - there’s a way forward they can offer. Of course Adeem The Artist is aware of how they can be swayed - ‘Run This Town’ is an upbeat, rollicking song all about how small town America can be nudged towards conservative Christofascism - but they’re aware so much of that working runs in explicit contradiction to genuinely rooted empathy and love. It’s why ‘Painkillers & Magic’ is such a desperately sad song in how as a younger person Adeem The Artist wanted to hear those heavenly choirs and believe - and where ‘Baptized In Well Spirits’ picks up its teeth wobbling between how alcohol soaks both religion and music and the wavering path between them - but also how joyful and sincere ‘For Judas’ feels, not just in the transgressive implications but how well they realize the setting of a queer love story that can be accepted and feel so lived in. And I think that’s another reason why I love ‘Books & Records’ so much: you can’t escape the very real and textured context of poverty on this album and the struggle within late capitalism to survive where you have to sell off your treasured books and records to keep the lights on, but the history and family and love that you carry within them gives you the impetus to keep trying; they’ll be what you’ll cherish in your final years, and you’re going to buy them back someday.

So to put it all together… I could be the guy to come and say that I was ahead of the game with Adeem The Artist, but the truth is that I wasn’t - I only only discovered them last year and they’ve been working for damn near a decade to get this well-deserved breakthrough. But what a breakthrough it is - it’s warm, infectious, endlessly witty and radically authentic and empathetic, handily one of the best of 2022. Y’all have run out of excuses to not hear Adeem The Artist, be they taking you to heaven, hell, or somewhere in between - a lot of folks will miss this simply as a factor of dropping very late in 2022; don’t be among them, check this out!