ALBUM REVIEW: On ‘COUNTRY,’ Skylar Gudasz Plays in Natural and Emotional Environments
Maeri Ferguson
Posted On August 7, 2024
If Joni Mitchell, Aimee Mann, and Sharon Van Etten’s voices wafted up into a cloud of lavender smoke, Skylar Gudasz would emerge from it in a poof, brilliant and gleaming. The golden-throated Southerner possesses that bewitching vocal quality that seems capable of hypnotizing those who hear it, and on her latest release, COUNTRY, Gudasz employs it with an intimidating ease.
Skylar Gudasz (photo by Roxanne Turpen)
You would be forgiven for letting her voice carry you off this earthly plane, but her lyrics are firmly rooted in the natural world. Raging wildfires, the complications of getting to know oneself, and the places that have shaped her are just a handful of the themes at play on COUNTRY.
Gudasz sets the scene with the opening track “Fire Country,” a haunting ode to a West Coast perpetually up in flames. “This one’s for earthquakes, yeah / This one’s for hurricanes / This one’s for fire country,” she sings, her voice like its own plume floating up over the mountains.
As a songwriter, she has an undeniable gift for painting a picture and never skimping on the details. “Colt legs swaying in a cotton dress / Barefoot on the road where they misspelled independence,” Gudasz sings like a slinky chant on standout “Mother’s Daughter,” a tribute to the titular heroine. Characters are vividly drawn, like on the stark ballad “Australia,” where the toxic push-pull relationship between a young woman and a shadowy older figure leaves a lingering impression. And on gems like “Truck” and “No Body,” the subject is the woman at the center of the story, figuring out who she is and how to grow without casualties.
Gender and girl-to-womanhood were already top of mind for Gudasz on her dazzling 2020 release Cinema (ND review), and here they deepen and expand. What she’s really getting at is identity and the people and environments that inform it. COUNTRY is almost meditative in its focus, an exercise in getting free from the tangled knots that try to keep people in place.
Skylar Gudasz’s COUNTRY is out Aug. 9 on Perseids Records.
