Sturgill Simpson - A Sailor's Guide to Earth

Sturgill Simpson has a real talent for taking a ballad and making it smoothly and seamlessly transition into a rocker.  It’s very evident here on his 3^rd album, A Sailor’s Guide to Earth.  While his previous albums explored outlaw country, A Sailor’s Guide to Earth takes a different tone from his earlier releases: 2013’s High Top Mountain and 2014’s Metamodern Sounds in Country Music.  He continues further in the metamodern direction and explores Americana in the style of The Band.  Many people think Sturgill’s voice sounds very similar to Waylon Jennings, but it’s clear he’s not simply doing his Waylon impression on this album.  A Sailor’s Guide to Earth was written as a letter to Sturgill’s two year old son explaining to him about life and real manhood.   Sturgill’s first album on a major record label, Atlantic Records, debuted at #1 on the country, folk, and rock charts and #3 on the Billboard Hot 100 charts.

The lyrics serve as a country lullaby to his young son, set against the sprawling seascape of horns, guitars, and keyboards.  “Breaker’s Roar” is a melancholy, nostalgic song that serves as a warning to his son and highlights themes in Platonic philosophy.  The concluding refrain, “It’s all a dream,” echoes Plato’s dream theory or “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” whichever you prefer.  “Sea Stories” illustrates what Sturgill always says in interviews, that you can sing a country song about anything.  In this song alone, he mentions angels competing in a game of Connect 4, traveling through East Asia, and playing Golden Eye on the Nintendo 64.  “In Bloom” is a cover of the Nirvana classic, and Sturgill makes one key addition to the lyrics. He adds, “To love someone,” at the very end.  The message to his son is that you can be sensitive and loving and still be a man.  While there was plenty of melancholy on the album, “Oh Sarah” was the only song that bored me to tears.  It has since been improved on several live versions, including one he performed on Conan O’Brien’s show.  “Call to Arms” is an anti-war song that absolutely rocks and showcases the talent of newcomer Jeff Crow on piano as well as Estonian wonder-kid Laur Joamets on slide guitar.  Sturgill channels his inner John Fogerty both in anti-war fervor and in vocal style, while not overtly copying Creedence.  It is a fitting end to the album. 

From the opening sound of the seagulls calling and the boat creaking amidst the rushing waves on “Welcome to Earth (Polywog)” to the last trumpet trill of “Call to Arms,” Simpson puts funk and psychedelia into country.  Laur Joamets, who grew up playing in metal bands in Estonia, had no problem adjusting to country, and I wonder if there’s anything he can’t do with the guitar.  Just listen to how he mimics the sound of a police siren and a helicopter’s whirling blades near the end of the album’s first single, “Brace for Impact (Live a Little).”  The new direction that Sturgill takes on this album is a mixed success.  Some of it succeeds and some of it falls flat.  Sturgill Simpson has opened new doors and expanded the horizons of country music.  I can’t wait to see where his travels will take him next.

Ryan Bingham - Fear and Saturday Night

Ryan Bingham learned to play country music during years of hard work in small time gigs and the rodeo circuit, while moving throughout the southwestern United States.  He likes to write music in the solitude of natural beauty without the distractions of technology, and therefore his music has a Bob Dylan or Neil Young singer-songwriter feel to it.  This is how Fear and Saturday Night came into being.

Fear and Saturday Night is the second Ryan Bingham album since he dissolved the Dead Horses and created his own record label, Axster Bingham Records, named after himself and his wife Anna Axter.  It was written during a dark time in Bingham’s life:  he had recently lost his mother to alcoholism and his father to suicide.  Despite this, the album is filled with optimism and laced with hope.  While his previous two releases, 2012’s Tomorrowland and 2010’s Junky Star, are dark, depressing, and melancholy, Fear and Saturday Night is a lot more upbeat and varied in style while still retaining some of the good old-fashioned country sadness that made Ryan Bingham famous.  The album opens with “Nobody Knows My Trouble,” which is classic, depressed, acoustic Ryan Bingham.  It continues with “Broken Heart Tattoos,” which is a song about what he wants for his future children, as he looks back on his own painful childhood.  “Top Shelf Drug” is a vintage, Black Keys style, alternative blues rock with delicious electric piano in the background, which features the timeless metaphor of love being compared to an addiction.  Perhaps the most hopeful song on the album, “Island in the Sky” contains a simple, yet powerful and uplifting harmonica riff.  With “Adventures of You and Me,” Bingham returns to the mariachi music of Laredo, Texas where he first learned to play the guitar. “Radio,” the first single taken from the album, features a classic country sounding riff with a lot of piano dancing around it.  The song shifts in mood a few times, with an increase in tempo, followed by a beautiful crescendo, before returning to the original theme with the last haunting guitar notes dangling in the listener’s eardrums.  Overall, the album lacks the speed of some of his faster compositions such as “Beg for Broken Legs” and “Tell My Mother I Miss Her So,” but lacks none of the energy and makes up for the tempo with sheer technical ability and songwriting genius.

Fear and Saturday Night is aptly titled.  It combines the fear and uncertainty of a lot of Bingham’s earlier compositions with the rollicking good time and honkey-tonk piano of a good old-fashioned, southern-fried Texas Saturday night.  When listening to this album, the listener will experience many emotions across the spectrum at once, and he or she will eventually have to drop everything and just sit and listen.  You will laugh, cry, dance around, and throw up your hands in amazement.  Ryan Bingham is Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan and Hank Williams all combined into one.  He is an outlaw, a troubadour, and a cowboy at the same time.  In fact, listening to Bingham’s acoustic folk songs, one can’t help thinking that he is Bob Dylan with a better voice and better production.  Fear and Saturday Night is Bingham’s best and most versatile album yet.  It surpasses even the magisterial country genius of “Southside of Heaven” from 2007’s Mescalito.  This is country music in all of its glory and country has never sounded so good.

Old Crow Medicine Show - Remedy

          The band that brought you Wagon Wheel is back with another dose of old-time country and bluegrass music that is guaranteed to get your feet stomping and your fingers snapping.  Remedy is Old Crow’s fifth studio album and first without founding member Willie Watson.  It is the band’s response to the current state of country music which frontman Ketch Secor believes pays little respect to its predecessors.  The album is an excellent mix of country blues and traditional bluegrass, and while it sees the departure of Watson, it also marks the return of founding member, Critter Fuqua, after a two album hiatus from the band due to substance abuse issues.  Old Crow attacks bluegrass and old-time string band music with a punk-rock intensity.  The album opens with “Brushy Mountain Conjugal Trailer,” a blues-influenced foot stomper about a man about to be hanged, featuring an excellent Dobro solo from Gill Landry.  “Sweet Amarillo” is another Dylan and Old Crow co-write, with Secor and Fuqua again digging into 1973’s Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid sessions, the same sessions from which Secor took Wagon Wheel.  It is a slower ballad, featuring Fuqua on the accordion.  This time, however, Dylan sent the track to Old Crow and asked them to finish it.  With “Sweet Amarillo” they only had about 28 seconds to work with compared to over a minute with Wagon Wheel.  Secor has never met Bob Dylan, but expressed his awe when he received the request from Dylan’s people.  It also took some communication back and forth between Dylan and Secor to get to the final version completed.  Other highlights on the album include “O Cumberland River,” a song about the time when the Cumberland River overflowed its banks, and “Doc’s Day”, a tribute to bluegrass legend Doc Watson who discovered Old Crow in 2000 when they were busking on the street outside a pharmacy in Boone, North Carolina and gave them their first big break.  The album ends right where it started, in prison.  “The Warden,” which features minimal instrumentation and all the band members singing in harmony, ends the album on a somber note with the band delivering a “Seven Bridges Road” moment.   The band says that Remedy is their greatest success to date, and I would agree with them, but it does include a few low notes.  “8 dogs 8 banjos” is full of nonsensicalities, while “Mean Enough World” and “Brave Boys” are nothing special and sound like something we’ve already heard on a previous Old Crow album.  “Sweet Home” features lead vocals from guitjo (6-string banjo) player Kevin Paul Hayes who is an interesting choice for lead vocalist in a group with so many excellent singers in it.  The album is a smashing success though and it succeeds in bringing fans of country and bluegrass together.  While Willie Watson has a new album out himself and is embarking on the concert trail as a solo act, Old Crow are still putting out hit bluegrass records.  Ketch Secor was truly “born to be a fiddler in an old-time string-band” and he proves it again here.  Remedy is a must-listen for any country music fan, but the album and Old Crow fans everywhere are sorely missing Willie Watson.

Pink Floyd - The Endless River

The Endless River comes from material leftover from 1994’s Division Bell sessions reworked by guitarist David Gilmour and drummer Nick Mason and it is the first Pink Floyd album in 20 years.  The album is a tribute to keyboardist Richard Wright who passed away in 2008 and contains many of his last recordings.  Bassist, lead vocalist, and songwriter Roger Waters, who left Pink Floyd in 1985, has had nothing to do with this project or any others in this David Gilmour led era.  With the death of Wright, The Endless River looks to be the last release in the Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame band’s career.  

From the moment the spoken word intro of “Things Left Unsaid…” haunt the listener’s eardrums to the final fading echoes of “Louder Than Words” this album is unmistakably Pink Floyd.  “Things Left Unsaid…”, with its mix of synthesizers and guitars, sounds like it would fit seamlessly into Pink Floyd’s 1975 masterpiece “Shine On You Crazy Diamond.”  From there, the album’s tracks flow seamlessly together like many of the tracks on Pink Floyd’s 1973 Magnum Opus, Dark Side of the Moon.  The Endless River winds aimlessly along with “Sum” which showcases some signature guitar work from David Gilmour, “Skins” which shows off Nick Mason’s prowess as a drummer, and “Allons-Y” parts 1 and 2 which made me think that Gilmour, Wright, and Mason were beginning to recapture some of the magic that was Pink Floyd.  Bonus Track “Nervana” is a rip-roaring David Gilmour solo that rocks the hardest of any song on the record but would be more at home on a Black Keys album than with the mystifying organ of Richard Wright and the cautious, pensive drumming of Nick Mason.    

For the most part, The Endless River is a collection of short, 2 minute, instrumental jams with the trio of Gilmour, Mason, and Wright lacking any remarkable or catchy melody.  Only “It’s What We Do” and “Louder Than Words” exceed 6 minutes, which is uncharacteristic of Pink Floyd.  Most of the album features Richard Wright piano outtakes dressed up with guitars, synths, strings, and percussion, which sound like Floydian slips when compared to the epics that Pink Floyd has recorded in the past.  The Endless River is a fitting tribute to Wright and a pretty good final effort for Pink Floyd, but the creative genius of Roger Waters is noticeably absent.  Even though the record contains some flashes of brilliance and a few echoes of the past, The Endless River is aptly named.  It drags on endlessly without any direction or unifying themes binding it together like the masterpieces of the 1970’s.  But most importantly The Endless River lacks Waters.

Robert Plant - Lullaby and the Ceaseless Roar

          Robert Plant, rock legend, proves he is a versatile artist and still relevant in today’s music industry.  His first studio album with backing band The Sensational Space Shifters and follow-up to 2005’s Mighty Rearranger, Lullaby… and The Ceaseless Roar combines traditional folk and bluegrass sounds, world music, and grooves that would make any Led Zeppelin fan start to dance.  Just like the name Led Zeppelin, Lullaby is an excellent mix of soft and loud, fast and slow, light and dark. 

The lyrics reflect a wide array of influences including a William Morris poem (Rainbow), an old Lead Belly folk song (Poor Howard), and Fulani African lyrics (Embrace Another Fall).  The Space Shifters provide excellent backing for Plant with electric guitars, banjos, keyboards, and even some African instruments such as a single-stringed fiddle called the ritti, courtesy of Gambian musician Juldeh Camara.  The African percussion on Turn It Up combined with the electric power of a Zeppelinesque riff makes for the album’s hardest rocking song.

While Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page is stuck in the past, remastering the old Zeppelin catalogue, Robert Plant is ascending new musical horizons.  Lullaby… and The Ceaseless Roar proves that Plant is still a master singer and composer in any genre, but with Jimmy Page embarking on a new solo tour in 2015, a Led Zeppelin reunion looks even less likely now.  Just in case Jimmy changes his mind, though, we can be sure, after listening to Lullaby, that Plant’s still got it.