ALBUM REVIEW: Amanda Anne Platt and the Honeycutters Process the Pleasure and Pain of Looking Back
Henry Carrigan
Posted On August 8, 2024
There’s an emotional yearning in Amanda Anne Platt’s crystalline voice, whether it’s for a person, a place, or a time. Her vocals come across with drenching clarity and vibrance, leaving the listener with their own desire to look back, to set things straight, to love purely, or at least to love rightly. Those vocals and Platt’s lyrics are the centerpiece of The Ones That Stay, the seventh studio album by Amanda Anne Platt & the Honeycutters.
Twinkling piano notes provide the foundation for the country folk ballad “Mirage,” a meditation on seeing things as they once were and seeing things as they now are. Nostalgia plunders every soul; as Platt sings, “We’re all drowning in the same mirage.” Swirling instrumentals flow beneath Platt’s soaring vocals about starting over on “Clean Slate,” recalling the music of the early Jackson Browne. With smoky, jazz lounge vocals, Platt croons wistfully on “On the Street Where You Live” as the band unspools a loping western swing rhythm to create this waltz-like version of the pop standard.
With an introduction that resembles Rosanne Cash’s “Seven Year Ache,” Platt’s “Forever” canters along on a swaying rock groove. It’s a reflection on facing the impermanence of all things, and the instrumentation and defiant vocals blend and ascend higher and higher as the song comes to a close. On the panoramic “Big Year,” Platt and the band create an elegiac, soulful requiem on the exquisite pains and pleasures of looking back and looking forward, regretting and anticipating.
On the straight-ahead country rocker “The Lesson,” Platt and the band explore the chances, and the missed opportunities, of learning from experience, while “Pocket Song” is a lilting lullaby of remembrance of a special person and special time, able to be revisited, especially in times of sadness.
The album closes fittingly with the sparse “Empty Little Room,” an elegant meditation on closing the door on the past — “Let us not come back here anymore” — and opening the door to the present and the future — “Morning’s coming soon.”
On The Ones That Stay, Amanda Anne Platt & the Honeycutters effortlessly combine lyrical beauty and honesty with instrumental brilliance, creating bright little worlds in each song.
Amanda Anne Platt & The Honeycutters’ The Ones That Stay is out Aug. 9 on Mule Kick Records.
