(Dead Oceans)
With help from Aaron Dessner, Bon Iver and Lucinda Williams, the Americana artist shares his uncertainties around his roots and relationships in unhurried, subtly melancholic songs
The first track on Kevin Morby’s eighth album is called Badlands. It refers to the unforgiving terrain of the American midwest and also comes freighted with pop cultural references: the title of Terrence Malick’s bleak 1973 neo-noir movie loosely based on the spree killings of Charles Starkweather; the ferocious track from Bruce Springsteen’s 1978 album Darkness on the Edge of Town that depicts the lot of a frustrated blue-collar worker “smashing in my guts” in a nowhere town. Unforgiving terrain, violence fuelled by nihilistic rage, frustration: the listener is thus primed for a song on which Morby, who was raised between the farmland of Missouri and the suburbs of Kansas City, paints a stark picture of the America from which he hails. But Badlands isn’t so straightforward. It’s driven by big, punchy, slightly distorted drums, but the music that plays over them is strangely laid back: a clean, clear guitar plays a gently addictive riff, Morby’s vocal has a conversational tone, there are sweet vocal harmonies. On the one hand, the lyrics talk about “the big disaster we call home”, but on the other suggest that “heaven is a place on Earth beneath the golden sky”. He concludes, with a shrug, “I can’t tell if I’m in heaven or the badlands.”
It sets the tone for an album that, in the best way, can’t quite work out what it thinks, conjuring a series of grey areas. Morby is particularly acute on the weird push and pull exerted by one’s home town, comforting familiarity and nostalgia (“home smells like cinnamon and the sad passing of time”) and doing battle with the sense that you never quite fit in: “Where no one ever makes a sound except me on this guitar,” as Morby puts it, a bluesy acoustic lick suddenly disrupting the austere sound of Cowtown for emphasis. But a sense of equivocation seeps into everything. On Natural Disaster, Morby can’t decide whether his swings in mood are something that should be dealt with via medication or meditation or just a natural occurrence, like landslides or hurricanes, that he furthermore needs as songwriting fuel. Die Young looks back on youthful hedonism with a shudder (“thank God we didn’t die young”) that can’t fully undercut how fondly he relates a succession of on-the-road touring scrapes.
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