Higher by Chris Stapleton
With unruly long hair, a Stetson and ragged beard falling to his chest, Kentucky’s Chris Stapleton looks like the guy on a reality show building an off-grid cabin in Alaska.
But this gifted songwriter – eight Grammys, 14 Country Music Association awards and nine from the Academy of Country Music – fills stadia across the States. He has duetted with Adele on the reissue of her Easy on Me (which got her on to the country charts), collaborated with Ed Sheeran and Sheryl Crow, and wrote huge country hits for George Strait and Kenny Chesney, among others. He’s recorded with Taylor Swift (I Bet You Think About Me) and Justin Timberlake (Say Something).
Stapleton makes pop artists cool for country listeners and takes his brand of country to a mainstream audience.
He cut his teeth as a writer in Nashville, fronted the bluegrass band SteelDrivers and, with his solo 2015 debut album Traveller, picked up his first Grammy, CMA and ACM awards.
His new double album, Higher, errs towards familiar themes (heartbreak, tough times, the outsider) with rasping vocals (It Takes a Woman), stadium-pleasing country rock (White Horse currently nominated for two Grammys, the swampy South Dakota) and with touchstones in Bob Seger (The Bottom) as much as Waylon Jennings (Crosswind).
Artists looking for more Stapleton to cover will alight on the country-soul ballads Loving You On My Mind and the Al Green-influenced Think I’m In Love With You, and Weight of the World which would polish up nicely as a final song in a Las Vegas show.
Higher is painted with a broad brush.
All That Was East Is West Of Me Now by Glen Hansard
The grit and sinew opening this fifth solo album by Ireland’s Glen Hansard – of the Frames and Swell Season, guitarist in The Commitments, a central character in the acclaimed 2007 film Once – are apocalyptic, desperate and urgent.
Hansard crashes in with his tough, tight band on the abrasively downbeat Feast of St John: “See a man of good standing pushed to the ground. And his lover attending … and her blood raging full muster, muster to the depths of your soul.”
The surging 61/2-minute Down on Your Knees which follows speaks of “pandemic, famine, war, privation, mass migration. Four horsemen riding … we’ll all go down on our knees ... Eventually.”
These first volleys suggest no easy ride. But thereafter are the unhurried, evocative, Cohenesque Sure As the Rain with strings and theremin (“Come dance with me down the Rue Du Faubourg Saint-Denise”), a conversational delivery (“Will you please stop butting into everything I say” on Between Us There Is Music) and that impending apocalypse offset with There’s No Mountain – “great or small you can’t climb”.
On Short Life, he sings, “It’s a dangerous lie that we’ve got endless time but there’s a real hope hovering.”
If Stapleton explores familiar themes, Hansard upturns them with his roar or dark whisper to shake out sin, redemption, fears, doubt and hope.
Higher, by Chris Stapleton, and All That Was East Is West Of Me Now, by Glen Hansard, are available digitally and on CD and vinyl.
