ALBUM REVIEW: Chris Smither Cuts Deep on ‘All About the Bones’

Nobody blends groove and gravitas quite like Chris Smither.

The folk-blues master leads off his new album with the title song, “All About the Bones.” Over a seductive mid-tempo rhythm burnished by his own deftly picked guitar, Chris Cheek’s late-night sax, and BettySoo’s ethereal backing vocals, Smither sings, “When you get right down to the rhythm / You get right down to the bones.”

Smither has always been about getting down to the bones, and with All About the Bones he continues to refine his distinctive ability to mix elemental feel with existential probing. The typically stripped-down and transfixing sound here is created by a crew that, in addition to Smither, Cheek, and Soo, features drummer Zak Trojano and multi-instrumentalist David Goodrich. The 79-year-old troubadour manages to be profound without being ponderous, and that’s because his sage, felicitously worded reflections are as free-flowing as his intricate guitar work and his conversational, sometimes droll singing. Of course we know it’s not, but he makes it sound pretty effortless.

On the brisk, countryish “Digging the Hole,” Smither points up the perils of a lack of self-awareness: “It’s hard to give instruction to a fool for self-destruction,” he observes, before delivering the kicker: “You’re already standing at the bottom.” And “if not for the devil,”  he points out mischievously in the song of that title, “there wouldn’t be a lot to do.”

On the languid “Still Believe in You,” Smither confesses to some vulnerability, and a sense of unease permeates “In the Bardo.” That mood is echoed in the piano-accented “Completion,” which leads him to offer some good advice: “Take what comes and forgo anticipation.”

The singer-guitarist is at his lightest on the jaunty “Down in Thibodoux,” a profile of a colorful bayou character, but “Close the Deal” serves up some not-so-veiled social commentary: “Nobody’s playing by the rules now / You can order the truth to go — have it your way.”

Smither chooses to close All About the Bones with a buoyantly up-tempo take on Tom Petty’s “Time to Move On” (the 10-song set’s only other non-original is Eliza Gilkyson’s soothing “Calm Before the Storm”). “What lies ahead I got no way of knowing,” he sings. “Let’s get going.”

Sung like a man whose muse shows no signs of dulling — and he knows it.

Chris Smithers’ All About the Bones is out May 3 on Signature Sounds.