Gary Louris
There’s little surprise that Gary Louris could make a solo album superior to or at least comparable with the seven albums he recorded with the Jayhawks. The band’s seventeen-year career required more the endurance of a marathon runner than of an afternoon jogger; successive lineups faithfully maintained the brand name even as the audience for their elegant melancholy pop never expanded to push the band far up the charts.
Vagabonds came nearly five years after Rainy Day Music, the Jayhawks’ swan song which resurrected the group’s signature sound: finely attuned songcraft, sweetly lined harmonies, country psychedelics, and lyrics expressing both bittersweet regret and solitary hope.
Vagabonds expands that blend just slightly by branching into psychedelic folk music, the trance of English folk balladry, and country gospel. Black Crowes lead singer Chris Robinson produced, bringing Louris to the hills of Los Angeles from the bleak midwest; the new setting positions the music with that city’s famed singer-songwriter scene of the early 1970s. Robinson’s preference for recording live without overdubs loosens each song from its frame, resulting in ten performances that have the communal haze of a late-night house party.
The songs are sweetly melancholic as always, but this time they tread darker. There are deep bruises under each layer of this music, caressed by pedal steel guitar and piano, giving Louris’ lyrics collected images with the plain beauty of a Walker Evans photograph particular potency.
Louris’ gift is balancing lightness and dark in the harmonies. His knack for crisp hooks remains, but is enhanced by Robinson’s understated atmospheric accents shadowy reverb, psychedelic detours, and sudden group choruses that sound directly summoned from church pews. Vagabonds is unsettling but relentlessly warm; this may be billed as a solo record, but no one could call it solitary.