Album Review | American Aquarium's Lamentations

It feels like yesterday American Aquarium released Things Change, a record begging the listener to live in its characters. A man consoling his partner who devastatingly recognizes the “world is on fire.” Someone coming to the hard realization they are better off confronting their addictions. Characters wrestling with the unconscionable and somehow making sense of it. 

Things Change was strong enough that new realizations continue to bubble to the surface. My initial reaction to the news that American Aquarium was headed into the studio with Shooter Fucking Jennings was, “I get you have a lot to say BJ, but we ain’t done processing the last one.”

Things Change was released in 2018. Since then, the pace of the real world has accelerated to warp speed while the power of American Aquarium’s Things Change has kept pace. When BJ Barham removed the governor from his songwriting motor several years ago, the result was an ascendancy to the upper echelon of his generation of tunesmiths. 

Lamentations, American Aquarium’s latest release straddles the raucous honky tonk rock of early American Aquarium and the more socially conscious nature of Barham’s last collection of songs. The themes are familiar - hard work, substance abuse and sobriety, the South, sad stories. With Lamentations, Barham has taken another huge step forward in songcraft. 

As we have come to expect, the album opens with a kick-in-the-teeth tune that comes to a soaring, anthemic coda. These things usually need time to marinate before we declare superlatives. Nonetheless, the title track is Barham’s finest songwriting. “Me + Mine (Lamentations)” sets the tone for an album full of scorching hot songs that feel like they were recorded at an American Aquarium show somewhere in Texas, the band’s home away from home. 

If you have seen them there, you know what I mean. American Aquarium always brings it regardless of venue. BJ and the boys (this lineup and those past) are professionals who take their craft seriously. But, the band is fueled by the fervor of its fans and folks in Texas take it up a notch.

More than any other studio release, Lamentations captures the spirit of American Aquarium’s greatest live shows- a testament to the touch of producer Shooter Jennings. Shooter seems to be the bridge between early, raw American Aquarium and the renaissance that began with Burn. Flicker. Die.

Most importantly, Barham has taken another stride in his examination of the South. We are living in a time where a generation of southern writers are taking on the South with a warm demanding hand. Folks like the Bitter Southerner, Jason Isbell, Drive-by Truckers, Lee Bains III- the list is long and growing. A group of people who are not content to make excuses for the way things are and the way things were. 

“I believe in a better south,” Barham sings on the album’s eighth track. It is a tune showcasing his acute ability to use critical observation as a source of hope. Hope for a better South, a better nation, a more honest examination of the ills that plague us collectively and individually. Lamentations is more than a new American Aquarium record. It’s a manifesto of the power of our best instincts.

Album Review | Kingdom in My Mind by The Wood Brothers

“The idea for this group has always been to marry our backgrounds, to imagine what might happen if Robert Johnson and Charles Mingus had started a band,” says Chris Wood of The Wood Brothers. Chris, his brother Oliver, and Jano Rix have melded genres while remaining anchored in American roots for nearly fifteen years. On their upcoming release Kingdom in My Mind, the ship takes flight tethered by the world’s longest rode.

Kingdom in My Mind does not ostensibly flow from previous Wood Brothers albums, yet from the first listen it feels like a logical next step. 2018’s One Drop of Truth was a departure from their normal recording process. It came together over a year period with multiple engineers at the helm. The result was an amalgamation of tunes that showcased the band as a unit. Each of their influences came through as an individual voice while blending into a gorgeous statement of an album. 

One Drop of Truth was nominated for a Grammy. Following that kind of reception would be daunting for most bands. The Wood Brothers are seemingly untroubled by such expectations. The band did not set out to make Kingdom in My Mind per se. The album began as an exploration of their new studio space in Nashville. 

They were jamming and getting oriented with the rooms of the studio. A group of musicians who know each other intimately, loosening their ties completely and exploring together. What happened was the inexplicable magic of music. Without meaning to, they had the bones of an album's worth of songs, which were later carved into their best work to date. 

Kingdom in My Mind kicks off with the funky, jazzy “Alabaster”- a song that captures the essence of The Wood Brothers and sets the tone for this record. It is a hopeful tune serving to open the listener’s imagination to the introspective places we so often live. 

“Little Bit Sweet” follows and lays the foundation for its sister song “Little Bit Broken” which comes later in the record. The tune starts almost like a jangly country blues number featuring Oliver Wood’s voice and guitar. Then Chris Wood’s bass and Jano’s special brand of percussion (complete with what sounds like a gong) come in to flip expectations on their heads. The song is a sonic divergence from the first track yet its place in the sequence of Kingdom of My Mind fits like a tailored suit. 

Midway through the record, the Brothers plant a flag cementing its theme. 

“Everyone has these little kingdoms in their minds,” says Chris Wood, “and the songs on this album all explore the ways we find peace in them. They look at how we deal with our dreams and our regrets and our fears and our loves. They look at the stories we tell ourselves and the ways we balance the darkness and the light.”

“When I’m lovin’ you I don’t think about my death” goes the chorus of the album’s main artery. The universality of our existential dread runs throughout this album. For some of us it’s a fear of not knowing what lies on the other side of our earthly demise. For others it’s the fear of leaving people behind. Death looms omnipresently and we all reckon differently with that reality. Only when we are truly present in the moment, when focused on a pure expression of love, can we escape the uneasiness that accompanies life and death.

Kingdom in My Mind explores tough questions with equanimity- uniting a multitude of sounds to create the most powerful expression in the storied catalog of The Wood Brothers. 

Kingdom in My Mind will be available everywhere you consume music on January 24, 2020.

The Wood Brothers- “Alabaster”

Thoughts on The Teenage Years of the 21st Century, an album by Micah Schnabel.

Sometimes, hell often, the constant barrage of information we consume can feel overwhelming. So many of us feel helpless watching from what seems like the sidelines, screaming our muffled voices and wishing for a sea change to wipe out the blatant corruption that assaults basic freedoms we once took for granted.

More than likely, if you read the above paragraph, you are a person who considers it uncontroversial. Maybe even tired. A bromide at this point. Thankfully, you don’t need to rely on me to express such sentiment in the way it deserves to be heard. Micah Schnabel continues to case the American condition in brutally honest and gorgeous prose with his latest record The Teenage Years of the 21st Century.

The bolts of this record are not new to fans of Schnabel’s work. The unmistakable sound of his voice. The tissue deep way in which he bares his feelings and thoughts. Those things are all consistently present in Micah Schnabel’s catalog and they ring true on this record.

What stands out is that he has taken another huge leap forward as a writer. One whose voice continually confronts its fears and anxieties. A voice punctuating conviction with poetry. 

It’s not easy hearing Schnabel sing about mobility justice, or the potential early unceremonious demise of those we love the most because they lack access to health care. Micah has always been gracious with his emotions for the sake of art. Perhaps never more so than on this record. 

Micah Schnabel’s work has aided a shift in my world paradigm. I was a libertarian-leaning registered Republican until the end of 2015, two years into my work with kids from underserved communities. Black kids in a racially segregated Southern town named after a genocidal former president. At that point, the Republican party had committed to an overtly racist platform, one that forced me to pay attention to not just race but class in this country.

I was reading Ta-nehisi Coates and Jeff Duncan-Andrade at the time. Both of whom heavily contributed to a reevaluation of how I viewed our political and social structures. In the summer of 2017, Youth Detention (Nail My Feet Down to the Southside of Town) by Lee Bains III and the Glory Fires and Your New Norman Rockwell by Micah Schnabel entered the canon of my personal midlife political revolution. Those records became the soundtrack for an unlikely transformation.

The characters in each of those albums were people I knew as a kid and folks I’d met as a thirty-something. People I viewed differently through the lens of time. In some ways, it took Schnabel’s Henry from his song and novel Hello, My Name is Henry and Bains’s young black girl who is just “too damn loud” for her teacher, to bridge that gap. 

The truth is, I’m a stubborn man. One who keeps an open mind but is nonetheless slow to change it. If nothing else, I am a thoughtful person. When I commit to an idea, it takes a person or movement for which I have a great deal of respect to shift that thinking. Ten years after I first started listening to Micah Schnabel, that shift has become tectonic.  

Schnabel has created an influential artistic world that deftly straddles fiction and real life. The protagonist in his excellent novel Hello, My Name is Henry reads a comic book called Memory Currency, which is also the title of my favorite song on The Teenage Years of the 21st Century. Micah has been playing it, and other songs from the album, live for a while now. The tune lays me out each time I hear it because I am confronted with Henry’s lessons on a regular basis. 

When we first recorded an Episode of The Marinade with Jason Earle, Micah said a number of things that made me reevaluate my worldview. I made a joke about people from Florida and Ohio being proud of the place from which they come. Micah’s whole demeanor changed. He said that being proud of the place from which you come is ridiculous. 

I was in my thirties. Well educated, well-read, and well-traveled by most of society’s standards. The simplicity of the statement and the way in which it was matter-of-factly delivered shook me. The fact that I had not fully considered such an obvious reality left me second-guessing a lot about how I viewed the world. Micah had not expressed a new idea to me, but I was not ready to holistically commit to an examination of my attitude about place until he challenged me. 

Micah Schnabel has a lot to say about place, class, policy, politics, humanity, and so much more on this record. He chooses words carefully but bares his heart with abandon. 

Maybe we are headed for “nuclear war.” Maybe the currency of our memories is all we will ever have left. None of it is easy to hear and Schnabel does not spare the listener many details of the peculiar times in which we live. 

Still, I find solace in the fact that, in spite of overwhelming messages to the contrary, there are a lot of powerfully convicted people like Micah Schnabel- courageously making art and treating it as their lifeblood. 

The Teenage Years of the 21st Century is triumphant, even if its namesake has not always gone that way.