Anyone still mourning the loss of the Civil Wars or wondering why a duo so successful couldn’t manage to stay together can just stop it now. A subtle stunner of a return to solo artistry, Beulah (out August 19 on Single Lock Records) resists comparison to John Paul White’s Grammy-winning duo or to just about anything else in contemporary country. It somehow achieves a delicate balance of Brecht-Weill, Piedmont blues, chamber atmospherics and his native Muscle Shoals, on material that sounds so tender but has a threatening, unsettling undercurrent.
“These are the words I’m hearing in my head,” he sings in “The Martyr,” a song that bears some sort of kinship with Jackson Browne’s “The Pretender.” (You also can’t hear his “The Once and Future Queen” without thinking of Dylan’s “It Ain’t Me, Babe.”) There’s just such an exquisite tension among melodies that have the lilt of lullabies, a vocal delivery that has the intimacy of a whisper and titles that suggest the conflicted emotions of “Make You Cry” (“Would it kill you to do some bleeding?”), “Hope I Die” and “Hate the Way You Love Me”—“I hate myself for staying, where I should and should not stay.”
Amid the mesmerizing pull of the album as a whole, the one for the ages is “I’ve Been Over This Before,” which sounds like it comes from the Cindy Walker songbook, right next to “You Don’t Know Me,” and merits a rendition by Willie Nelson. A release that ranks with the year’s best.
