Brown Horse
All The Right Weaknesses
(Loose)
★★★★

FOLLOWING their superb, sludgy (in a good way!) debut, the Norwich six-piece return with another magnificent record.

Road tested during an intense touring schedule, the songs have a power all of their own, fluidly shifting from altcountry to a harder rock feel. Like a secret recipe, there is a depth and mystery to proceeding that adds up to something very special.

There’s certainly lots of your favourite artists in the mix — Crazy Horse, The Felice Brothers, Drive-by Truckers to name a few — but Brown Horse are very much their own band. Corduroy Couch is terrifically exciting, while I wager you won’t be able to stay still listening to the fiddle and piano intro of closer Far Off Places.

A captivating, raucous set, who would have thought Norfolk would birth one of the leading lights in contemporary Americana?

Craig Finn
Always Been
(Thirty Tigers)
★★★★

BEST known for being the frontman and lyricist in the much loved US rock band The Hold Steady, Craig Finn is now on his sixth solo record.

Everything that made his previous work so enthralling is present and correct, namely his knack for writing sympathetic short story songs about everyday lives. According to Finn, most of the set concerns the rise and fall of someone who pursued a career as a clergyman.

Always Been has the added bonus of being produced by Adam Granduciel from The War On Drugs, which is most noticeable on the pulsating intro to A Man Needs A Vocation.

Finn fans will love Fletcher’s, a spoken word track in the mould of God In Chicago from 2017. “The ones we’ve known the longest/ Can pull us down the strongest,” laments one of the track’s characters.

Julien Baker & TORRES
Send A Prayer My Way
(Matador)
★★★★

PLAYING a show together in 2016, millennial US indie rock icons Julien Baker and TORRES — aka Mackenzie Scott — agreed they should record a country record.

Nine years later and here we are. Send A Prayer My Way includes some classic-sounding country, albeit written by two queer artists, and very much at the alternative end of Nashville. There’s some terrific pedal steel — check out the Outlaw Country styling of the amusingly titled The Only Marble I’ve Got Left.

Some of the tracks echo the sound and romantic confessionals of Boygenius, the supergroup Baker plays in alongside Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus. “I love you all the way to hell and back,” they sing on single Sugar In The Tank, while Tape Runs Out opens with the brilliant lyrical hook “Baby, can you fill me in on last night?”