PopMatters' 20 Best Americana Albums of 2018

Nashville-based singer-songwriter and violinist Amanda Shires’ take on Americana is heavy on poetry and introspection. With a breathy, earnest yowl that recalls a young Dolly Parton, Shires sounds commanding on the hurts-to-love-you opener “Parking Lot Pirouette” and the playful Southern rocker “Break Out the Champagne,” while producer David Cobb (Sturgill Simpson, Chris Stapleton) shines up her more vulnerable side on “Mirror Mirror.” But the closer, “Wasn’t I Paying Attention?”, cuts the deepest: It’s a poignant song about addiction, made especially haunting by the fact that she helped her husband and collaborator Jason Isbell overcome his own related struggles.

Track Listing Parking Lot Pirouette Swimmer Leave It Alone Charms Eve's Daughter Break Out the Champagne Take on the Dark White Feather Mirror, Mirror Wasn't I Paying Attention?

After exhilarating dips into guitar rock and country, Carlile returns to her sweet spot: tear-jerking Americana that shows off her crackling croon. It’s her sixth album and her most moving, with vulnerable outsider anthems rooted in healing and hope. There are ballads about addiction (“Sugartooth”), suicide (“Fulton County Jane Doe”), heartbreak (“Every Time I Hear That Song”), and starting over (“Harder to Forgive”), but underneath the hard truths is plenty of optimism. In “The Joke,” a song for kids who don’t fit traditional roles, she offers a light at the end of the tunnel: “I’ve been to the movies/I’ve seen how it ends/And the joke’s on them.”

You can do a lot of living in 70-plus years, and fortunately, country-folk great John Prine has been documenting what he sees for over 50 of them. The album title is redolent of its mood, approaching the twilight years with a sense of wonder and humor. “Knocking on Your Screen Door” counts the blessings of being humble, and “Caravan of Fools” is a not-so-disguised jab at political incompetence. His well-sharpened wit cuts deep across these 10 songs. “Crazy Bone” reminds us all to stay weird, and “When I Get to Heaven” describes a rollicking afterlife after-party: “I’m gonna get a guitar and start a rock ‘n’ roll band/Check into a swell hotel/Ain’t the afterlife grand?”

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2016’s radiant *Honest Life* was a breakthrough for Courtney Marie Andrews. Here, the Arizona singer/songwriter’s pockmarked country finds broader, more reflective inspiration. There’s a hymn-like solidity to the album’s 10 songs, all telling stories of struggling people, as Andrews describes, “chasing that bigger life.” But she isn’t just in the business of chronicling sadness. The delicate piano on “Rough Around the Edges” belies its message of rugged self-acceptance, while the hearty “Kindness of Strangers” lets the sun pour through.

After breaking through with a batch of restless, itinerant songs on Honest Life in 2016, Courtney Marie Andrews longs for something more permanent on the follow-up. The Seattle singer spends much of May Your Kindness Remain exploring ideas of home and what it means to have roots, on 10 new tunes that are lusher and more expansive while leaving plenty of room to showcase her astonishing voice. Andrews and her band recorded May Your Kindness Remain with producer Mark Howard, whose voluminous credits include albums by Lucinda Williams, Tom Waits, Bob Dylan and Emmylou Harris. Howard’s understated aesthetic suits Andrews, who pushes herself toward bolder musical arrangements and a fuller, more soulful sound than the traveling-woman-with-guitar feel of Honest Life.- Eric R. Danton of Paste Magazine

Recorded against a backdrop of political division and dread, Love in Wartime, the 2018 release from Americana darlings Birds of Chicago, is a rock'n'soul suite under the influence of the epic music generated by artists of the '60’s and '70’s. Love is the through-line. "Any act of love is an act of bravery," says Allison Russell. "These songs are fragments of covenants of trust and understanding. We want to give people some good news. And we want them to be able to dance when they hear it."

Owen Lake and the Tragic Loves’ “electro-country” sound is both freshly nostalgic and startlingly unique. Hard-driving synthesizer licks meet tight three-part vocal harmonies, buttery bloops and bleeps, crying pedal steel, and pounding electronic beats in the band’s first full-length record, “The Best of Your Lies.” Owen Lake’s debut EP, “A Love on My Mind” (2009), introduced the band’s genre-bending style, which draws from the traditions of 1960s country, 1980s dream pop, and modern electronic dance music, mixed with an experimental aesthetic all Lake’s own. With “The Best of Your Lies,” Lake expands and deepens the electro-country sound, blending a honky-tonk barroom atmosphere with late-night dance-club delirium and the faded glamour of a sweeping countrypolitan string orchestra. It packs an emotional punch to the heart, and beckons the bruised listener onto the dance floor. The album’s title track, an Owen Lake original (one of two composed by children’s book author and fiddle player Anica Mrose Rissi with composer and electronic musician Jeff Snyder, who is also Lake’s producer, manager, and doppelganger), narrates a desperate plea to a straying lover, from a betrayed spouse who prefers to remain in the dark. Pedal steel floats over Lake’s bittersweet country croon and vocoded harmony, while smooth strings and a honkytonk fiddle converse with a sharp-edged, syncopated drumbeat and subtly funky bassline. The album offers electro-country twists on both well-loved and forgotten classics. “I’ll Be There to Welcome You Home” (originally performed by George Jones and Melba Montgomery) pairs twin fiddles with the most intense, pummeling waltz beat ever committed to vinyl. The song explodes into a synth-bass arpeggio and rock-guitar maelstrom, and ends in a soul-stirring a cappella hymn. “Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone” (a Carter Family cover) features dark vocoder chords brooding over an acid bassline and punchy odd-meter drum machine. A flanger-drenched string section enters to expand space and time in the final verse. “Always, Always” (made famous by Porter Wagoner and Dolly Parton) contrasts an open, soaring male-female duet against the stark and menacing undertones of a buzzy bass synth and a rough snare. The chorus crescendos with the digital shine of FM synthesizer low brass, echoing fiddle, and twangy baritone guitars. One imagines a sudden camera cut to burning trashcans in an alley as an atonal guitar solo slices through the middle of the track, before the final rousing chorus gives way to an extended instrumental dance outro. Lake’s stellar stage band, The Tragic Loves, is joined on the album by Grammy-nominated jazz pianist Pascal Le Boeuf (Le Boeuf Brothers), Pulitzer Prize and Grammy winner Caroline Shaw (Roomful of Teeth, Kanye West), pedal steel virtuoso Rich Hinman (Roseanne Cash, Neko Case), and experimental pedal steel pioneer Susan Alcorn (Mary Halvorsen Octet). Music videos for two of the songs, “The Best of Your Lies” and “Wicked Heart,” created by visual artist Jessica Segall and robotics artist Ryan Luke Johns, will precede the release. Owen Lake and the Tragic Loves will perform record release shows at Shapeshifter Lab in Brooklyn, NY (November 29), and Princeton Public Library in Princeton, NJ (November 10). Come listen and cry along to “the new sound of country.” www.owenlake.com

The title of Quebecois roots singer Kaia Kater’s third album is a double entendre—a reference to both her father’s homeland of Grenada, and the US military invasion that prompted him to emigrate to Canada as a teenager in the mid-’80s. His spoken-word recollections form the conceptual framework for the record—a meditation on imperialism, displacement, and the cyclical nature of history. Leaning off the banjo-based traditionalism of her previous releases, *Grenades* exudes a hazy country-rock vibe redolent of the early-’70s Laurel Canyon greats, with Bahamas guitarist Christine Bougie’s dreamy electric-guitar slides serving as the portal through which Kater navigates her father’s past and our present. The album’s warm, familiar sound is embedded with bitter truths, as Kater observes the unstoppable creep of capitalism on the gorgeous *Harvest*-era Neil Young flashback “New Colossus,” or the war-torn scenes that cut through the organ-smoothed country-soul of the title track. But hope radiates from the despair—even as she laments the perils of the modern world on the stunning a cappella hymn “Hydrants,” her unbowed performance suggests giving up is not an option.

A creative force in her own right, Kaia Kater rises to bold new heights of imagination and creative expression on her third album Grenades. With abundant poise and poetry, Kater composes an odyssey about personal identity, memory, and discovery in the wake of her father’s journey as a young political refugee. She draws upon her diverse musical influences in Quebec, the Caribbean, and Appalachia, and her bicultural experience as a second generation Grenadian-Canadian, to envision a new path for herself and her songs.

Dom Flemons presents Black Cowboys pays tribute to the music, culture, and the complex history of the golden era of the Wild West. In this single volume of music, the first of its kind, Flemons explores and re-analyzes this important part of our American identity. The songs and poems featured on the album take the listener on an illuminating journey from the trails to the rails of the Old West. This century-old story follows the footsteps of the thousands of African American pioneers who helped build the United States of America.