on the pulse - 2022 - #6 - ernest, shooter jennings & yelawolf, hailey whitters, jenny colman, sarah shook & the disarmers, the cactus blossoms

…you know, I feel like I’ve covered a little less country in 2022 than I would like, and I think it’s about time we fix that. Another all-country episode of this series, let’s get On The Pulse!

The Cactus Blossoms - One Day - I’m not sure whether to say that this Minneapolis duo was on my radar thanks to the indie country scene throwing a solid amount of acclaim in their direction, or finding their newest project thanks to a random dive on Bandcamp. But with a jaunt through their catalog, they’re actually surprisingly easy to describe: imagine classic Everly Brothers harmonies with a smattering of soft-focus 70s country touches; perhaps a bit sleepy even when they added a bit more grit to their 2019 project, and the writing could use a little more meat, but when the warm textures and harmonies are this charming, it’s hard to care that much? Anyway, this is their newest project, and I’d probably say it’s closer to their 2016 album You’re Dreaming than their last - the electric textures are more burnished nestled alongside the acoustics, the production as a whole feels more rounded and gentle courtesy of a more developed bass presence and playful percussion, but no less warm and inviting in its stripped back 70s midtempo textures full of touches of pedal steel and harmonies as rich as ever. Honestly it’s such a brisk, comforting listen that it might take a few times before you start wondering what really stands out across the project, outside of Jenny Lewis stepping in to provide some very delicate vocals on ‘Everybody’. And that’s the trick with this album, there’s not much in the way of a dramatic standout amidst the uniform quality provided you have an ear for this sort of retro pastiche, just the subtle moments that catch you off-guard but have an almost hypnotic quality: the hushed 60s-esque harmonies bouncing off the sharp lead of ‘Hey Baby’, the gentle AM-rock popping of ‘Is It Over’ and ‘Lonely Heart’, especially with the latter having its playful pedal steel and guitar interplay, the chirpy lead that bounces off the surf rock guitar timbre on ‘Runaway’, or the shuffling minor key echo of ‘Ballad Of An Unknown’. Granted, if the lyrics had a little more distinctive flair that would help - rarely bad outside of the title track being a kissoff they can’t sell and ‘Ballad Of An Unknown’ doing a snapshot of the homeless that does very little, a lot of what we have are pretty mature songs of love and loss and remembrance that in a different time could have become standards for how plainspoken and effective they are. But that’s the thing, the Cactus Blossoms are very much in the shadow of those standards and influences - not a bad thing because they’re really good at it and this is a solid album, but if there’s a band that needs to take a bit of a leap, it is this one. Pretty good, not quite great.

Sarah Shook & The Disarmers - Nightroamer - And speaking of acts I should have been covering years ago, Sarah Shook & The Disarmers have been on my radar since Sidelong got the Bloodshot rerelease in 2017, playing to a rougher brand of country that tilted into indie rock and even punk rock, reminding me a lot of Lydia Loveless but with a slightly more old-school bent. And given how damn solid Years was in 2018, I was really excited to see what a long absence would do for Sarah Shook and their band… and full disclosure, I really wanted to like this one more than I do. It’s an odd situation because I’m not really sure what changed that much since Years outside of little details that just aren’t coalescing - their vocals are a little deeper in the mix which doesn’t help the hooks pop in the same way, especially with a rougher recording, which strangely feels a little less inflected with raw edges alongside the pedal steel; I’ve heard folks call this way more of an indie rock or adult alternative release and while you might hear it a bit with some 90s/2000s progressions in the lead guitar melodies on a few songs, overall that’s just not accurate, this is very much country. Instead, especially with the acoustics and drums it feels like the highs are mixed particularly sharp, which doesn’t help the grooves pop as much as they could either. And then there’s the writing, where I’m not going to say it’s bad - Sarah Shook has an eye for nuanced framing and a very level-headed approach to relationship drama and a lonely struggle against one’s vices, where they’ll take the blame as often as they’ll throw it back but ultimately strive to keep trudging forward - but it’s not at all surprising or boundary pushing for them. A lot of songs here could have shown up on either of the last two albums and without more distinctive detail in the compositions, this album can run together really fast. Now that’s not saying this isn’t a good vibe, because Sarah Shook has a swagger and texture they pull off really well, but without much in the way of standout tracks, it’s hard to recommend outside of that niche. Certainly a solid, enjoyable album… not a great one, though.

Jenny Tolman - Married In A Honky Tonk - Now this was a nice surprise! For those who don’t know, Jenny Tolman’s name has been coming up in the underground the past few years as potentially being the next coming of country Kacey Musgraves, and going into her 2019 album There Goes The Neighborhood, it’s an apt comparison thanks to the quirky balance of humorous and heartfelt, textured neotraditional instrumentation, and genuine wit all the way through. Her voice might not be quite as distinctive - probably runs a little closer to Angeleena Presley or Carly Pearce - but the playfulness balanced out with some more adult leanings - okay, let me just say it, it’s hornier - wound up endlessly charming and I really was excited to hear this new album. And yeah, this is really great, and there has been a progression since There Goes The Neighborhood, not just in how she uses the intro to set the scene of the album in the same small town universe that might be more encompassing than some might realize, even as she’s grown a little older and wiser since getting married in the meantime. If anything this album feels more like a slightly broader, flashier expansion of what we previously got with that vintage neotraditional charm with pedal steel and fiddle now augmented with some soulful touches on ‘Sweetest Revenge’ and ‘Watering The Weeds’ - seriously, her usage of backing vocals is legit superb - and even horns on ‘Working Woman’s Blues’, where Tolman takes her sardonic observations to a wider angle lens. And it’s not just in the excellently balanced, heartfelt songs of love and romance like the gorgeous ‘Afraid’, the spacious ‘Same Train As You’ with that fiddle, and the heartbreaking closer ‘Nothing Left Of You’, but also needling into online gossip culture on ‘World’s A Small Town’ and even workaday capitalism on ‘Watering The Weeds’ and ‘Working Woman’s Blues’ - I’m not sure I’ve heard many lines as cutting as ‘we spend our lives, workin’ long hard hours / To buy the things to impress the people that we donʼt like’! But this is not an album that’s trying to be revolutionary , it just steps into some charged territory with a wink and smile that leaves you a bit shocked at the clever revelations she breezes through - one of my favourites is ‘I Know Some Cowboys’ which is a coy shot at her partner to put some work into satisfying her or she’ll go to Texas and find cowboys who will, kind of ballsy to be so blunt about it. Now some of the broader comedy doesn’t always click - the title track feels a little like a retread of Carrie Underwood’s ‘Last Name’, and ‘Home To Roost’ pushes its running metaphor to a bit of a corny extreme - and there’s a part of me that does miss the slightly rougher textures and subtler edges on There Goes The Neighbourhood. But this album is legit great, one of the strongest country projects I’ve heard thus far in 2022 that’s absolutely worth more attention; you probably missed this album this year, you should fix that.

Hailey Whitters - Raised - So when I covered Hailey Whitters in 2020, I remember finding an artist that I mostly liked in terms of her co-writers and backing team, but where the approach to her own sound, from the production to the vocal delivery, still needed some refinement, so hearing about something close to a concept album coming from her with Raised did have my curiosity and attention. And you know, I get why this is getting a lot more ears this time, because the first big pivot is immediately obvious and a major upgrade: instrumentation and production. Call me a sucker for a solid neotraditional pivot, but the wells of pedal steel off the warm acoustics, firm bass, and welcome fiddles immediately gives Whitters’ sharper, Natalie Maines-esque vocals a better foundation, and there are less of the clunky gimmicks that could occasionally pull me out of her last album - hell, replacing them with B. J. Barham of American Aquarium on ‘Middle Of America’ feels like stacking the deck in her favour! And while there are songs that take some rougher detours - the smoky ‘Plain Jane’ and ‘The Neon’ with its subtle gallop, the handclaps punctuating ‘Everything She Ain’t’, the soulful touches behind ‘Boys Back Home’ - on average they feel more organic and better balanced, a major net positive. What’s also worth highlighting is that there are fewer name co-writes in general - only one from Brandy Clark and two from Lori McKenna - which makes sense for Whitters’ back and forth relationship with her hometown where she was born and raised, which as she’s gotten a bit older finds a deeper pull tugging her back from more rebellious years, probably showcased the best on ‘Beer Tastes Better’. And on the one hand that deeper sense of wisdom adds some balance to the rough edges of ‘Big Family’ and ‘Middle Of America’ the storytelling of ‘College Town’ that highlights exactly how kids change when they go away for school and doesn’t shy away from any tension, or the ode to sensitive guys on ‘Pretty Boy’ serving as an interesting balance to ‘Boys Back Home’, which shows the moments where there’s a wistful yearning for guys who stayed behind and kept some character. On the flipside, though, some of that old petty streak does slip into ‘Everything She Ain’t’, and I did find that some of the rural, small town fondness definitely tipped into more straightforward hagiography you hear all over the most forgettable parts of mainstream country, which didn’t so much feel like pulling punches as reflecting a more conservative bent that didn’t go as deep as it could - and maybe it’s just as a Canadian where it has been legalized, but I found ‘Our Grass Is Legal’ to be so goddamn corny in the wrong way. But I think my larger point of frustration is that for as much as I get good texture and framing from Hailey Whitters’ small town stories, I feel like there’s another step that needs to be taken, either with more unique lyrical details as there are a few songs that lapse towards cliche, or a little more depth to help her differentiate from her influences. As it is, absolute improvement across the board and that makes for a really good album, it’s just lacking that added flair, edge, or depth to find greatness. Still a very good listen, worth hearing.

Shooter Jennings & Yelawolf - Sometimes Y - Full disclosure, I’ve been kind of tired of Yelawolf the past few years; he’s got his niche and a couple songs I really respect, but some of the nasty rumours swirling around his ugly exit from Shady combined with wildly inconsistent production and some highly questionable collabs just kept me at a distance - he did an entire project with Riff Raff in 2021, for god’s sake. But this was a collab that did attract my interest: a country rock project produced entirely by Shooter Jennings, and while critical reception has been… let’s be polite and say very mixed, I figured I’d give it a shot, at the very least it could be the funny kind of disaster. And here’s the thing: it’s a complete mess in a way that these sorts of genre fusions often are, smearing together 80s hard rock and power pop - ‘Radio’ in particular damn near reminds me of Bon Jovi - southern rock, a smattering of country, and let’s not forget some increasingly awkward southern rap touches overflowing with glossy synths from Jennings himself where the seams between all of them are obvious. It’s the sort of weirdness that often comes with these sorts of genre fusions where it sits in an uncanny valley that you may wind up liking if the compositions hold up, but it’s not weird enough to push boundaries and can leave you thinking a more focused approach would be more effective - or you just get the closing songs like ‘Fucked Up Day’ with its live trap skitters and ‘Moonshiner’s Run’ with its seedy Volbeat imitation that can’t remotely sell its heaviness which are both weirdly clunky and melancholic to end this project, especially for as abrupt as it is. And if you’re here for Yelawolf as more of a rapper than as a singer, you’re going to be disappointed - he still has flows but he’s never had as much vocal power as he thinks he does, and his very nasal delivery is not for everyone. And in the usual problem I’ve had with Yelawolf’s lyrics, if he doesn’t get into more storytelling or raw emotional territory, a lot of his backwoods-inflected sleaze on the outskirts of any American dream can feel more two-dimensional texture than insight, a lot of grimy rock and roll iconography where you’re hoping there’d be a little more cutting focus - and while that can work, the melting pot of genre makes pulling more coherent messages an exercise in futility. And yet, the secret weapon Yelawolf has always had is a knack for melodic composition, and with Shooter Jennings helping refine the details, there are just some shockingly great hooks on this album: the jangling ‘Hole In My Head’ with the blasts of organ off the guitars, the bassy smolder and roiling sizzle of ‘Rock & Roll Baby’ with those terrific-sounding drums, the pedal steel bleeding across the smoky spoken word and acoustics of ‘Shoe String’, and ‘Jump Out The Window’ is his stab at 80s Springsteen/Mellencamp and again, it’s way better than it has any right to be - Jack Antonoff, you may have more competition! Now look, a lot of folks will just find the messy stylism too much to stomach - that’s been an issue with Yelawolf since Love Story in 2015 - but when a lot of the production is consistently solid and there’s enough compositions that can pull the flurry of bourbon-soaked ramshackle Americana imagery together, I think there’s enough decent moments that grew on me, and I’ll endorse. Absolutely a weird listen, but a pretty good one.

ERNEST - FLOWER SHOPS (THE ALBUM) - Let me make this abundantly clear: ERNEST had an uphill battle to win me over. He started off in country rap, for god’s sake, and wound cowriting for a lot of the bro-country scene as the subgenre wound down - but going back to his 2019 project it gave me the impression he was a bit of a chameleon as a performer, and while he had a lyrical cadence and flow, he didn’t quite have a sound or distinctive identity, which might be why he was able to slip towards neotraditional country so effectively with ‘Flower Shops’. Yes, it sucks that Morgan Wallen wound up as the anchor point to push it to mainstream attention given that all he has is a performance credit, but hey, the full album is now, what did ERNEST deliver? Well, that vaguely anonymous feel translates to this album as well: yeah, the supple pedal steel and strings embellishments play up an old-school, borderline 70s countrypolitan timbre to a lot of the textures, which on a textural level will be an easy sell for a lot of folks - seriously, the production is warm, lush, well-balanced, just genuinely great - but dig a little deeper, and what anchors this sound? I’ve heard ERNEST compared to HARDY a few times as a writer who has “flavour” - we’ll come back to this - but can’t really sell it as a unique vocal personality, and while I think ERNEST has better taste as a whole and doesn’t default to list-driven cliches as often, it’s not surprising that he spent more time behind the scenes than in front of the mic. So you’d expect the writing to be what puts ERNEST on a different level… and you know, I’m not sure it does. The problem is that outside of ‘Flower Shops’, there’s just not much in the way of detail that gives ERNEST a lot of distinct personality beyond the current crop of bro- or boyfriend country writers; he tends to default to more settled love songs like ‘Tennessee Queen’, but is also a bit of a free-roaming, hard-drinking screw-up on songs like ‘Feet Wanna Run’ and especially ‘Comfortable When I’m Crazy’ but not to the point where there’s anything close to danger or intrigue, mostly because there’s always a surreptitious dodge of responsibility mostly by pointing the finger at the girls for pushing him to it. The weird thing is that when we get to the post-relationship songs on the back half of the album like ‘Did It With You’, ‘What It Comes To’, and ‘Some Other Bar’ the production loses a lot of atmosphere and gets way closer to the overly polished mainstream cuts that are basically interchangeable on Music Row, and it kind of compromises the illusion there’s something more here. And no, that doesn’t make it bad by any means, it’s a decent introduction, but it’s not one that feels overflowing with potential, and I’m not sure how long it’ll stick, that’s all.