50 albums into a stellar career, Loretta Lynn still sings like Nashville royalty | Review
In other new releases, Charles Lloyd & The Marvels go deeper with their southern roots, but Tune-Yards don't sound like themselves.
Loretta Lynn
Still Woman Enough
(Legacy ***)
Loretta Lynn sits on a throne on the cover of her 50th album, looking regal as she regards her subjects with a guitar by her side with her name etched on the fret board.
And why not? The coal miner’s daughter is an august, 88-year-old presence. Dolly Parton, who’s close to a generation younger, is her only real competition as Queen of Country Music.
The fiery Still Woman Enough shares a title with Lynn’s second autobiography. Unlike Van Lear Rose, the 2004 album collaboration with Jack White that’s her best known recent work, Still Woman Enough doesn’t go in for hipster targeted reinvention. (This one was produced by her daughter Patsy Lynn Russell and John Carter Cash.)
In fact, the title track, which features Reba McEntire and Carrie Underwood and is a companion piece to Lynn’s 1965 hit “You Ain’t Woman Enough” (included here as a duet with Tanya Tucker) is the album’s only brand new song.
But Still Woman Enough plays to Lynn’s strengths. There’s one more guest appearance, with Margo Price, the contemporary Nashville rebel who best embodies the feminist, fighting spirit of the auteur of “Fist City” on the 1971 hit “One’s on the Way.”
Elsewhere, it’s Lynn making her way though her illustrious catalog, plus covers of songs that she’s sung all her life, like Hank Williams’ “I Saw the Light” and the ghostly ballad “I Don’t Feel at Home Anymore.” She delivers “Coal Miner’s Daughter” as a spoken recitation.
There are no revelations, but the renditions are rock solid, with Lynn’s vocals impressively undiminished, her legacy intact, and her position on the throne secure.
— Dan DeLuca
Charles Lloyd & The Marvels
Tone Poem
(Blue Note ****)
The great saxophonist Charles Lloyd, who celebrated his 80th birthday last year with the live album Kindred, has lived most of his life in California. He enrolled at USC at 16, then after a decade on the road famously retreated to Big Sur.
But Lloyd has never shaken the influence of his native Memphis, and those Southern roots emerge most vividly in his recent albums with The Marvels, including their latest, Tone Poem.
The two guitarists with whom he shares the band’s front line allow for plenty of twang, even when the music is at its most angular and adventurous. Bill Frisell is renowned for his influential melding of progressive jazz and folksy Americana, while pedal steel player Greg Leisz fluently speaks the language of improvisation with an instrument more associated with honky-tonk.
Bassist Reuben Rogers and drummer Eric Harland, meanwhile, carry on the deeply attuned jazz intellect forged during their years as half of Lloyd’s renowned quartet.
On their previous two albums, The Marvels fully embraced their country ties by collaborating with Willie Nelson and Lucinda Williams. The band goes it alone this time out, but the lyricism remains — from an airy take on Leonard Cohen’s “Anthem” to a roiling revisit of Lloyd’s classic “Lady Gabor.”
The saxophonist’s choice of material makes surprising and inventive connections with the Deep South, whether it’s via the beaches of Cuba on Bola de Nieve’s “Ay Amor” or by reimagining an Ornette Coleman tune as a rousing New Orleans parade.
— Shaun Brady
Tune-Yards
sketchy
(4AD **)
Tune-Yards singer Merrill Garbus is cursed with an incredibly expressive voice. At her most emotive, there are no variants of exuberance, desperation, pleading, or righteous anger that are beyond her ability to render, nothing that can’t be underlined, italicized, or bolded in her snarl, bellow, or cry.
From the heights of w h o k i l l (2011) to the weirdo-fun score for Sorry to Bother You (2018), Garbus’ voice has been the defining element of Tune-Yards’ sound, along with jangly percussion and creative vocal layering.
But on sketchy, with 11 tracks in under 40 minutes, Garbus and her husband/collaborator, Nate Brenner, seem more interested in playing around in a mellower emotional register than they usually do. Her voice is masked (as in “homewrecker”), fuzzed out (in “nowhere, man”) or a little distant and underwater (in “sometime”).
And so while sketchy is still an enjoyable listen — joyful, creative, and confidently without answers to the big questions Garbus asks — it’s like watching Joel Embiid drain a 3-pointer. It’s wonderful to know it’s within his capability, but you wish he’d just take that base-line spin into a dunk.
On sketchy, “hypnotized” and “be not afraid.” are those untouchable post-moves — dazzling, forceful songs that are unmistakably Tune-Yards in their articulation. It turns out that they sound their best when they sound like themselves.
— Jesse Bernstein