Jason Isbell & The 400 Unit - The Nashville Sound (June 16, 2017) Album • Page 7

Definitely. I'm hoping he gets a big first week of sales for this. And man, would it be killer if he followed in the footsteps of Stapleton and Sturgill and got a Grammy AOTY nod.

 

He's due. I hope he tops the "country," "folk," and "rock" charts simultaneously again like he did for SMTF. That was a hilariously surreal moment haha

 

Found this short clip of "If We Were Vampires" on Instagram and I'm already sold

 

I don't like much country but I love Isbell, I would be shocked if anything on here was "too country" for me.

 

Your days all just got better: Jason Isbell Is Still the Best Songwriter Country Music Has

 

Song rips 10/10. The churches bars and grocery stores line couldn't be more true about that part of the world

 

holy shit...

 

My brain was already exploding from new HAIM, FOB, Phoenix, Blink today. Now this. Fucking incredible.

 

Thought Hope the High Road was pretty meh but Cumberland Gap rips. And "If We Were Vampires" sounds great.

 

Okay I've heard enough from this record now to know that it will be pretty damn tough for Crack-Up to top it for my AOTY

 

Cumberland Gap

 

Yeah, that race is over man.

 

You are going to love this song.

 

This feels like his "Born in the USA" from what I've heard so far...widescreen take on the nation at a moment in time, but also deeply grounded in personal experience, matched by big sweeping arrangements. Affirm/deny?

 

I've listened to that clip about 30 times now. Ugh.. I don't want to wait for this.

 

Born in the USA isn't the parallel I would draw, just because that record is so glossy and maximalist and this is...not. It reminds me more of Darkness or The River, personally. It's definitely a logical progression from Something More Than Free though. It reckons with a lot of what has happened in the past two years, both in his life and more broadly.

 

Duly noted.

I hope you're spamming Jim Flammia's inbox (if he's still the one covering Isbell) asking for a Chorus.FM exclusive!! Haha. Glad to see Jason get exposure of course but fuck Vice/Noisey

 

This piece actually does justice to the themes and context of "Cumberland Gap," as opposed to that atrocious piece on Noisey

Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit Consider The Abyss on Scorching Rocker "Cumberland Gap" « American Songwriter

 

Man, maybe I could get one if some people stopped whining about the new Fall Out Boy song and listened to "Cumberland Gap"/replied to that thread.

Woof, I'd only skimmed that Noisey piece until you mentioned how bad it was. I hate when people write about country/Americana/roots music like that. Music writers like that are part of the problem.

 

I can already tell that I'm going to be very displeased with a lot of coverage of this record. Both "Last of My Kind" and "Cumberland Gap" are 100% about the world I come from, and the characters in those songs could be real-life people I love very much or even myself. So it's going to be tough not to take things personally. At the risk of posting something I'll regret, with regards to the Noisey piece, I'll just say that I'm not really interested in what someone from the NYC cultural groupthink bubble has to say about the 2017 equivalent of "Coal Miner's Daughter."

Took me ten minutes of nail-biting diplomacy to say that that politely haha.

 

This is the most correct take I've seen on "Cumberland Gap" today though:

You Need to Hear Jason Isbell's Blistering New Single, "Cumberland Gap"

 

I read this thing awhile ago, I can't remember where, but it was one of the writers from one of the big publications doing a "Best Country Albums of 2016" list. And he said that he almost gave up on country music after the election because he blamed the southern states for Trump and felt like the music of those states supported the values that led to his election. And this was someone who had supposedly been a fan of the genre for years, (briefly) writing it off on a gross simplification and generalization, without trying to understand why the people in these states and these songs might have seen things differently.

Even when the big publications praise country artists or albums these days, it's with this weird condescension. Like, "Well most of these people are clueless dumb buffoons but at least we've got Jason Isbell who we can trust to write a good story," or something like that. It really bothers me, and I expect it to be going in full force for this record. Like, wait until Noisey gets to write about "White Man's World."

 

It's depraved classist bullshit and that kind of "write off the South/rural people" mentality is more at the root of why Trump won than any kind of inherently Southern or rural values system. The South certainly has more than its fair share of bigots, but when you extrapolate that to "all Southerners are bigots," you only give the bigots a megaphone. News flash: people in the South are not a homogeneous unit. Holding everyone in the South responsible for Toby Keith et al would be like holding all New Yorkers responsible for Derek Jeter being an asshole. Second news flash: lots of people of color in the South, and believe or not, yes, lots of them like country music. Might be hard to believe for some, but it's true in my experience--more so among Latinos.

Commercial country deserves every last bit of the bad reputation it has had for the last few decades. But it's the two small steps and awkward pivot from bashing the Nashville establishment to bashing Southerners writ large that is frustrating and completely unjustified.

 

The really alarming people about music critics being so condescending about country and southern music in general is that these are people who usually seem to understand why it's important to be open-minded about music with perspectives and narratives that aren't the norm for middle or upper class white people.

 

I'm all fired up now. Can I just write about this album now? A month and a half isn't too early for a review, right?