In HBO’s Jason Isbell doc, he and fellow singer-songwriter Amanda Shires appear to courtroom marital catastrophe debating the very best phrase for a lyric (spoiler: their union survives). Writing is excessive stakes for Isbell. “If I used to be makin’ folks dance, I wouldn’t sit there and waste my time,” he says, laughing cautiously. “However they’re not on the market dancin’ — I gotta get these prepositions proper.”
He does on Weathervanes, his brutally lovely ninth studio album. Its songs tremble with anger, desperation, and concern; characters wrestle with remorse and unhealthy appetites, struggling to chop losses within the wake of dangerous selections and cascading penalties. Isbell’s tales glint with memoir and headlines as they put human faces on head-count epidemics: mass shootings, opioid dependancy, Covid-19. Even the love songs are bruised and weary, chilled by chilly reality. Inextricable from all that is the 400 Unit, as important right here as Loopy Horse or the Heartbreakers to Neil Younger or Tom Petty’s nice moments. As a bunch doc, Shires and her fiddle included, it’s Isbell’s strongest album up to now.
What’s loopy is how, in these grim occasions, that is successfully feel-good music. In “Dying Want,” the chillingly seductive slow-burn single a couple of hell-bent accomplice, Isbell observes “it takes a complete lotta medication to really feel like just a little child.” Have the snares and lures of dependancy — a subject Isbell is aware of properly — ever been nailed so exactly? The balancing act between gentle and darkish continues on “King of Oklahoma,” the place a hardscrabble dude with a behavior to feed plans a scrap-metal heist and a prescription forgery after remedy for a office harm leaves him with little greater than “a pocket filled with drugs.” The beautiful “Solid Iron Skillet” builds its chilling narrative in forensic snapshots: flowers on a grave, a brutal stabbing, a boyfriend “with smiling eyes and darkish pores and skin,” an “previous man on the Quickstop/Mendacity to the county cops.”
Isbell has an activist streak — he was fast to name Morgan Wallen on his racially-insensitive bullshit, and donated royalties he’d earned from Wallen’s model of his “Cowl Me Up” to the NAACP — and in tune, Isbell does didactic properly. His 2017 “White Man’s World” deserves a spot in Florida’s high-school curriculum (shout out to Ron DeSantis). Ditto Weathervanes’ “Save the World,” which addresses college shootings through collateral trauma.
However the strongest songs right here have the fewest solutions. “Miles” reveals how household dysfunction occurs with the very best of intentions, because the 400 Unit flash its basic rock bonafides, with the guitars echoing each latter-day Beatles and Younger’s tender homicide ballad “Down by the River.” The nostalgic prettiness may strike some as a Band-Assist on a bullet gap. However you’re taking your therapeutic the place you will get it.
