A Sailor’s Guide to Earth.

There’s been a lot of noise about Sturgill Simp­son in the world of coun­try and it’s not hard to see why. His third album, A Sailors Guide to Earth is, if any­thing, even more ambi­tious than his break­through album, Meta­mod­ern Sounds in Coun­try Music from 2014.

It should have been a com­plete dis­as­ter. A con­cept album, which is bad enough, in the form of a let­ter to his new­ly-born son, which, obvi­ous­ly, is even worse, whose touch points are Sgt. Pepper’s, Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and the Bea­t­les-inspired, late Otis Red­ding. Amaz­ing­ly, he lives up to those lofty ambi­tions whilst some­how still man­ag­ing to deliv­er up what is unde­ni­ably an alt coun­try album.

Otis Red­ding.

He might balk, albeit a tad effort­ful­ly, at that dis­tinc­tion, between coun­try and alt coun­try. But usu­al­ly there’s a world of dif­fer­ence between the pow­er­ful­ly plain and straight as a die world of coun­try and the more nuanced, qui­et­ly sophis­ti­cat­ed realm of alt country.

But impres­sive­ly, Simp­son man­ages to strad­dle both worlds, and then some. The horn and string arrange­ments on a num­ber of the tracks here are very specif­i­cal­ly designed to recall the rus­tic, gut­tur­al rhythms that came out of Stax with their string and horns (and if you haven’t already seen the doc on Stax, reviewed ear­li­er here, treat your­self). The results call to mind ear­ly Van Mor­ri­son. But then there’s also a very som­bre cut of Nirvana’s In Bloom re-imag­ined as teenage angst.

This is an impres­sive­ly ambi­tious album that is every bit as sub­stan­tial as every­one has been sug­gest­ing – it gets an 8 from the boys at Pitch­fork here. A seri­ous album from a major artist. You can see the video for In Bloom here.

Love Let­ter for Fire.

Pop is so ubiq­ui­tous and the results so invari­ably sac­cha­rine and offen­sive­ly MOR that it’s easy to miss the few grown-ups who work in the genre. Sam Beam has been record­ing as Iron and Wine for the last decade or so, and after begin­ning in roots Amer­i­cana mode he has slow­ly but sure­ly set­tled in the world of pop – his last album was reviewed ear­li­er here.

Sam Beam and Jesca Hoop.

He pro­duces the same kind of thought­ful, artic­u­late yet unabashed­ly emo­tion­al pop that you get from Jen­ny Lewis and Christo­pher Owens, and ear­li­er from Squeeze and Every­thing But the Girl (in their ear­li­er incar­na­tion), and, from before again, with Car­ole King and Har­ry Nils­son (see the doc on him, reviewed ear­li­er here).

On this lat­est album Love Let­ter for Fire he teams up with Jesca Hoop, who was men­tored by Tom Waits after she land­ed a job work­ing for him as a nanny.

The bad boys, John Lennon and Har­ry Nilsson.

Like all he best pop, these songs man­age to be intro­spec­tive yet upbeat with just a hint of melan­choly. Their smooth, boy­girl har­monies wash­ing over you before dis­ap­pear­ing again into the ether. Togeth­er with coun­try, it’s the only oth­er genre to resist black influ­ences and not be ren­dered hope­less­ly redun­dant ever after.

They get a 7.5 fromt the boys from Pitch­fork here, and you can see the offi­cial video for the sin­gle Every Song­bird Says here.

Sign up for a sub­scrip­tion right or below and I shall keep you post­ed every month on All the Very Best and Worst in Film, Tele­vi­sion and Music!