This is a statement album, broad and populist to a fault.
#Hiss golden messenger live in leeds full
But that short song is a parenthetical aside on an album full of grandiose declarations about the world today. Together, they worked up some moments of exuberance and experimentation, like the rousing ending of “Way Back in the Way Back” and the Nebraska-style harmonica that haunts “Glory Strums (Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner).” On “Angels in the Headlights,” Taylor ties up a sun-bleached pedal steel, a drunken piano, and a nylon-string guitar with baling twine, creating something both strange and affecting. He then recruited an impressive roster of headline guests, including Taylor Goldsmith from Dawes and legendary country guitarist/producer Buddy Miller.
Even the album cover looks like a mashup of Lateness of Dancers and Hallelujah Anyhow.Įxcept for two co-writes with Anaïs Mitchell and Gregory Alan Isakov, Taylor wrote most of the songs alone at his North Carolina home and recorded in his small office studio. The title track recalls “Devotion” from 2013’s Haw and so many other airy ballads he’s written in the past. Here it just sounds like a thing that happens in a Hiss Golden Messenger song. “Sanctuary,” for example, opens with a tentative acoustic strum before the rest of the band comes crashing in, but that trick worked better on previous albums, where it depicted an artist who’d come to a crossroads, agonized over his path, then set on his way with a new spring in his step. It’s not just the crickets: Listening to Hiss Golden Messenger’s ninth proper album in 13 years (not counting live releases, joint albums, and a box set), it’s hard to shake the sense that you’ve heard all of this before.
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