ALBUM REVIEW: Amos Lee Searches and Finds on ‘Transmissions’

Amos Lee has been a remarkably busy man as of late. In the last two years, he’s released three full-length studio albums. He began the streak with 2022’s Dreamland (ND review) and followed it up with two tribute albums to two of his greatest musical influences: Chet Baker and Lucinda Williams (ND story). Just this year, he’s already toured for several months, performed with The Nashville Symphony, and collaborated with several other artists, including this incredible song by BAILEN.

Now Lee’s latest album, Transmissions, arrives. Recorded in rural Marlboro, New York, over the course of five days and produced by Lee himself, he’s created an incredibly varied, yet comprehensive album. Across the 12-song set, Transmissions finds Lee and his longtime touring band traversing a wide sonic range that draws from jazz, folk, pop, and soul to capture him at his purest, raw and still searching.

Transmissions begins with “Built to Fall,” something less of a song and more of a spoken incantation. Churning with a quick rhyming pattern and a lilting piano, Lee plays the part of soothsaying street preacher, resolving with the adage “Walls were built to fall.” Like the best Amos Lee tracks, “Beautiful Day” is built on raw acoustic guitar strums and a kicked-back drumbeat. It’s a ragged, bittersweet tune. On “Carry You On,” he sings patiently, understated, while Mikaela Davis lends her harp to the proceedings.

“Hold On Tight” finds Lee at his soul pop finest. The guitars and keys are both fuzzed out, his melody is hanging behind the beat, and the hook hits hard. If you are looking for the newest banger on the concert set list, it’s this one.

And if you wondered how recording that Chet Baker album affected Lee, “Madison” is the answer. Here Lee pushes his register even higher, nearing a falsetto on this vulnerable epistolary tune paired with sparse piano. “Darkest Places” is a jubilant pop song, recalling some of Lee’s finest work from 2011’s Mission Bell. Lush organ and synthesizers ground the tune, and paired with mandolin and stacked harmonies, it’s the album’s most musically ambitious tune.

The back half of the album quiets down, and Lee turns the mirror a little closer on himself and the people that make up his life. He vows to seek out the comfort of a friend on “Keep On Movin.’” “Night Light” catalogs the remnants after a relationship’s dissolution. “My friends say that I’m in their prayers,” he sings on it, with palpable appreciation. As producer, he supplements his voice with rich string sections on “Lucky Ones” and “When You Go.” On the title track, Lee channels pure Prine, and fittingly so, as he first started playing guitar after hearing Prine’s Great Days in college. It’s a stripped-down affair, allowing Lee to dig in on the chorus and supply another one of those trademark hooks.

 It’s clear throughout Transmissions that after nearly two decades of work, Lee is immensely grateful for a life in music, and that he’s still contemplating how to maintain it. Taken as a whole, it’s an album of personal retrospection in a culture flowing at hyperspeed. Using elements from across his wide musical palette, Lee’s made a record about middle life, love, and yielding to the moment that you are in with grace and humility.

Transmissions is out August 9 via Hoagiemouth Records and Thirty Tigers.