Album reviews: The Highwomen, Tool, Young Thug
What you should (or should not) be listening to this week.
The Highwomen
The Highwomen
(New Elektra ***)
The Highwomen album is brilliantly branded.
Country radio playlists this decade have become ridiculously, unconscionably dude-dominated. The bold response of Brandi Carlile, Amanda Shires, Maren Morris, and Natalie Hemby has been to form a female supergroup whose name plays off the Highwaymen, the totemic quartet of Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Johnny Cash and Kris Kristofferson.
The band’s name makes its point, and the 12-song title track opens with a rewrite of the Jimmy Webb-penned “Highwayman.”
Highwomen flips the script with stories of persecuted women, from Central American immigrant mothers to victims of the Salem Witch Trials. Smartly, the four white women bring in black British country singer Yola to sing a verse about a civil rights worker. It’s a virtuous but not terribly entertaining beginning — and a reminder that collectively, The Highwaymen, weren’t nearly as great as the sum of their parts.
Thankfully, Highwomen picks up from there. “Redesigning Women,” written by Hemby, is a working mother’s task-juggling tale, about “full-time living on a half-time schedule / Always trying to make everybody feel special.” The family vs. the workplace theme is amplified in “My Name Can’t Be Mama,” written by Carlile, Shires, and Morris.
Because the project was created between solo commitments, the album — which entered the Billboard country charts at #1 — feels a bit pasted together. Still, the quality is high, and Morris impresses with two older songs, “Loose Change” and “Old Soul,” both purer country than her crossover solo work.
The standouts are “Crowded Table,” a celebration of inclusion written with Lori McKenna, and the ingenious “If She Ever Leaves,” penned by Shires and her husband Jason Isbell with Chris Tompkins, and sung by Carlile. It’s a gay country song that seems predictable until a man is made to understand he has no chance whatsoever with the woman he’s hitting on because — believe it or not — she’s not interested in men. — Dan DeLuca
Tool
Fear Inoculum
(RCA **)
Fans don’t need this review to talk them out of listening to an album they’ve awaited for 13 years. After all, it would interfere with the paradox of analysis-resistant “free thinking” that Tool has cultivated over the decades. But the music has always fit that bill: limited power-chord riffs that prefer to convolute unnatural rhythms than attempt a harmonic counterpoint or dissonance within a disciplined economy.
Tool love the fact that their music resembles optical illusions, unresolved staircases to nowhere that sound more enticing on paper. Their mutated time signatures and expert palm-muting also sound better in every tension-building intro of these six tracks — exceeding 10 minutes apiece plus drum solos — before you realize each song’s almost over and hasn’t traveled an inch. That drum solo actually leads into the 16-minute “7empest,” Fear Inoculum’s final track and only moment of release, of crunch, of dynamic explosions corralled into reasonable intervals.
The party starts after the first 58 minutes; feel free to pronounce it “Seven Empest.” — Dan Weiss
Young Thug
So Much Fun
(300 Entertainment/Atlantic ***½)
It can’t be much of a surprise that Atlanta rapper Young Thug’s first album debuted atop the Billboard charts. Inventive EPs, a signature mumble-quavering voice, and a rep as one of hip-hop’s nicest guys preceded the event of the aptly-titled So Much Fun.
Here, the Young one goes for joy in all of his performances, an exuberance in his elasticity and contagion in his melodies. So Much Fun is as heavy on the song craft, as it is the silliness, whether it is his longing soliloquy, “Jumped Out the Window,” his ditzy Cookie Monster impression on “Cartier Gucci Scarf,” or an anthemic bit of teamwork on “The London” with Travis Scott and J.Cole. While “Ecstasy” continues Thug’s quest for epic choruses (and giddy drug references), “Sup Mate” finds the rapper teamed with old pal Future making goofy faux-British accents and riding its trap rhythm. Future never sounds as if he’s having a good time, so Thug’s zeal must’ve rubbed off. — A.D. Amorosi