The new Margo Price album will win you over with its ’70s rock groove
Two more new releases to check out: Chloe x Halle's "Ungodly Hour" and Michael McDermott's "What in the World":
Margo Price
That’s How Rumors Get Started
(Loma Vista *** 1/2)
Margo Price made a rowdy entrance in 2016 with “Hurtin’ (On the Bottle),” the debut single from Midwest Farmer’s Daughter, an album released on Jack White’s label whose title nodded to Loretta Lynn while introducing Price as a honky-tonk rebel.
Two albums down the line, Price has progressed impressively, growing more ambitious with the thematic scope of 2017′s All-American Made and now comfortably working in 1970s rock mode with the bold That’s How Rumors Get Started.
Recorded in Los Angeles in the same studio as the Beach Boys cut Pet Sounds, Rumors was produced by Price’s country music iconoclast buddy Sturgill Simpson.
The album doesn’t make a show of its subversiveness like Simpson’s 2019 metal-edged Sound & Fury. Instead, it confidently goes its own way, largely leaving steel guitars and all manner of twang behind as Price settles in to make a top-notch rock record with seasoned studio musicians like bassist Pino Palladino and Tom Petty keyboard player Benmont Tench.
The surfaces are smooth, and there’s tension roiling underneath. Rumors is a superbly crafted 10-song set that was written, recorded, and planned for release in 2019. It was pushed back first by the birth of Price’s daughter, Ramona, then by record company drama, and again by the pandemic and the illness of Price’s husband and musical partner, Jeremy Ivey, who has had several inconclusive tests for COVID-19.
No matter if songs like the simply soulful “What Happened To Our Love” or “Stone Me” are absolutely brand new: They capture Price working at a high level, ever more confident in her artistry.
She’s so in the groove, in fact, that she even manages to say something fresh when navigating a cliche-ridden subject like the quest for success. “If it don’t break you, it might just make you rich,” she sings in the song “Twinkle Twinkle.” “You might not get there, and on the way, it’s a b—!”
— Dan DeLuca
Chloe x Halle
Ungodly Hour
(Parkwood/Columbia ***)
As a pop enterprise, Beyoncé is now at Prince’s level. And her protégés Chloe and Halle Bailey contribute more of their own songwriting than Morris Day ever did with the Time.
This follow-up to 2018′s heavily Lemonade-indebted The Kids Are Alright is a departure to no place in particular — but making a high-profile R&B album in 2020 with no conceptual arc is its own distinction. The sisters are 20 and 22 now, and for once in pop, titles like “Do It” and “Tipsy” come as a natural progression rather than a defiant rebuke of their teenage fame.
Their music has matured beyond YouTube into something that’s fully club-worthy. The tuned percussion of “Baby Girl” and psychedelic guitar molasses of the best-in-show title track make sure of that.
“Wonder What She Thinks of Me” sounds like something Halle Bailey might sing in her upcoming role in the live-action Little Mermaid remake. It’s their calling card as ambassadors for a young, Black generation with Hamilton and Disney soundtracks mixed in among their musical influences.
— Dan Weiss
Michael McDermott
What in the World
(Pauper Sky *** 1/2)
“Dark days are coming for the USA,” Michael McDermott warns on the leadoff and title track of his new album, which melds the hell-bent lyrical thrust of Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” with the anthemic rock muscle of classic Springsteen.
The rapid-fire verses paint a devastating portrait of a broken, dystopian society, with release in the cathartic chorus: “I’m tired of hearing everything will be OK!”
In other words, the song distills the essence of great rock-and-roll. And while McDermott has been a master of that for three decades, he happens to be at the top of his game right now.
Even more powerful than “What in the World” is “Mother Emanuel,” a harrowing account of the 2015 massacre at the Charleston, S.C., church.
For the most part, the album looks inward rather than outward, and McDermott is both raw and incisive as his characters wrestle with their inner demons. “Contender,” which borrows Marlon Brando’s line from On the Waterfront, marries the album’s most upbeat musical accompaniment to a self-lacerating admission of failed potential.
That certainly doesn’t describe the McDermott of today: an artist who has emerged from the darkness of his own past and, six years sober, is not squandering his prodigious gifts. The Inquirer is premiering the video for the song, below.
— Nick Cristiano