Iris DeMent doesn’t need to get adjusted to this world. She’s been telling us as a lot for 30 years. The 62-year-old singer-songwriter has spent her life in music, striving towards a sacred sense of objective in a contemporary world intent on the precise reverse. From the opening notes of her first album, 1992’s Notorious Angel, when she proclaimed that she believed in love and lived her life accordingly, to her 1994 cowl of Merle Haggard’s “Huge Metropolis” (“solely an excessive amount of work and by no means sufficient play”) to 1996’s “Wasteland of the Free,” which detailed an American heartland affected by rip-off preacher-politicians and crony capitalism, to Lifeline, her 2004 album of conventional spirituals.
The stakes for that non secular search have by no means been greater, the necessity for a collective awakening by no means extra pressing, than this very second: That’s the thesis of Workin’ on a World, the brand new album of rollicking gospel-roots music from DeMent, simply her second file of absolutely unique music in a quarter-century. DeMent has emerged from the previous half-dozen years of worldwide turmoil and communal rot with a message to convey: She is engaged on a constructing, and the work has solely barely began.
Not like the impressionistic Southern memoir of her attractive final album of originals, 2012’s Sing the Delta, DeMent’s newest is her most outward-facing work. The album is a survey of DeMent’s reignited sociopolitical inspiration and desperation, set to a country-gospel palette firmly inside her wheelhouse. The primary signal that she’d discovered a brand new route got here in 2020, when she teased the album centerpiece “Goin’ Right down to Texas,” an eight-minute soliloquy that celebrates Nashville rebels the Chicks and multi-faith Democracy, whereas taking intention at everybody from Bush-era conflict criminals to Jeff Bezos to second modification fundamentalists.
She is daring sufficient to threat corniness on this assortment of hymns and odes to her non secular heroes (Mahalia Jackson, Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, the pro-Palestinian activist Rachel Corrie). However delivered from DeMent, whose voice has by no means sounded extra curious and dedicated (take heed to her phrasing within the final verse of “Warriors of Love”), these messages of spirit-rising and movement-building really feel much less like MSNBC screeds than heat invites towards a righteous calling.
Even so, the danger is the purpose: Workin’ on a World is a profound protestation towards the concept of giving up and giving in to the decimation and darkness that absolutely enshrouded DeMent after the 2016 election (she’s stated the title observe, a music about what it means to attract power from the resistance of our ancestors, saved her life). Workin’ on a World is in the end rooted in the identical elementary mission DeMent has been engaged in from the very starting of her profession: drawing secular, non secular power from gospel music, telling mystical tales about neighborhood and perseverance, and discovering which means amid trendy alienation within the meantime. It’s simply that now, greater than ever earlier than, DeMent is urging us to sing alongside together with her.