Quietly Blowing It

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Over 12 albums, North Carolina's M.C. Taylor and his band Hiss Golden Messenger have helped cut the ever-evolving shape of Americana. With their latest, the band is faced with an America that's as visibly uneasy as it's been in half a century—where sometimes just being good isn't good enough, but at least golden-rule intentions are a place to start. And, as always, music at its best holds up a mirror. Taylor does so with "If It Comes in the Morning," a song written during protests against police brutality; faced with what sometimes still feels like a hopeless situation, he chose to cling to the idea that the country, and the world, won't just give up or fall back into old routines. "Count up our losses/ Lay a rose at the crosses/ And hope hope is contagious … there’s a new day coming," he sings while a saxophone blows low and slow. On "Hardlytown," he imagines an intergenerational conversation that explores, as he has said, "the tension that exists between selflessness and selfishness": "It's cradle to the grave, so be good to each other" goes the mom's verse; "I try to be brave/ Oh mama, I don't know," her son replies. "I'm as cold as ice and I don't wanna do no favors." The piano rolls, the harmonica keens, and the frustration simmers on both sides. Taylor borrows the title of a 1962 movie about a rebellious kid who uses running as a literal and metaphoric escape for the soft-rock easiness of "Glory Strums (Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner)." "Way Back in the Way Back" weaves in Sunday-morning horns and a soulful chorus, "Mighty Dollar" puts dub rhythms to good use, and the loose jangle of "The Great Mystifier" is driven by an Appalachian oompah beat. Taylor also enlisted singer-songwriter Gregory Alan Isakov, Buddy Miller, the Lone Bellow's Zach Williams and Dawes' Griffin and Taylor Goldsmith for the album, with the latter offering backing vocals on the terrific closer, "Sanctuary"—a gentle but upbeat shuffle, lifted by organ that sounds like hope itself. "Feeling bad/ Feeling blue/ Can't get out of my own mind/ But I know how to sing about it," Taylor sings. Not that he's kidding himself: "You want good news/ You want sanctuary/ When you try to get real/ Oh, they break you on the wheel." Great protest music can come out of turmoil, but so can reflective, anxious and sad songs that, at the very least, provoke thought. © Shelly Ridenour/Qobuz