country-rock

Mikaela Davis is a harpist who plays in jam bands. You’d likely guess neither from Graceland Way, her fifth record, where the songs are tightly composed and the harp sits back in the mix, surfacing on songs like “11:11” where it belongs and otherwise playing a quieter supporting role.

Listening to it I variously thought of Sheryl Crow, Emmylou Harris, Tom Petty and Stevie Nicks. Upbeat, major-key country pop with the California light turned up. Davis has coined “bootgaze” for the country-shoegaze blend, which joins cowboy punk and farm emo in this year’s growing pile of useful neologisms. There are fuzzed-out guitars low in the mix, though anyone arriving for Loveless will leave disappointed.

“Nothin’s on the Radio” is the platonic Sheryl Crow major-key country rocker, right down to the childhood-in-the-back-seat lyric. The guest list is interesting: Madison Cunningham on the opener, Tim Heidecker somewhere in there too, Wednesday’s Karly Hartzman on “Junk Love.”

The harp turns out to be the least interesting thing about Mikaela. This isn’t a gimmicky record, it’s one of the year’s best.

Brown Horse are from Norwich, which you would never guess from Total Dive. The guitars are pure Crazy Horse and the pedal steel weeps on cue. A song called “Heart of the Country” arrives with no apparent irony. This is the modern Americana mould—the one Ovven, Ratboys, Florry, Tiberius and a dozen others are working right now, all of them tracing the same lines back through MJ Lenderman to Jason Molina, Lucinda Williams, Silver Jews, the Drive-By Truckers, Wilco, Uncle Tupelo.

The geography is the only misdirection. The other song titles (“Wreck”, “Sadness Reigns”, “Oblivion”) tell you exactly where the lyrics live, and they aren’t wrong.

The standout is “Twisters”. You could argue the record doesn’t move around much: the mood, the tempo, the instrumentation and the preoccupations hold fairly steady from start to finish. That’s a fair criticism of a less assured album. Here it isn’t one. When a band sounds this good doing one thing, the consistency reads as confidence rather than limitation, and I’m happy to sit in it for 45 minutes.