Country music in the 21st century is the weirdest thing, and not much of it seems to have to do with the country any more. At its commercial end, it sells billions of records by men with tight T-shirts and women with very white teeth who all drive gigantic 4x4s, making gigastars (in the US at least) of the likes of Tim McGraw and Taylor Swift. Elsewhere there is rootsy bluegrass for urban hipsters, avant-garde classical-electronica-folk, and a vast swathe of “alt.country” and Americana acts that blur the lines between indie rock and retro country.
It's in this last category that Shonna Tucker and her band fit. Living in the indie rock hub of Athens, Georgia, the backing band consists of serious-looking guys with neat beards and crumpled shirts, and the cutesy hand-drawn artwork and cookbook that accompany the CD suggests that we are well into dork territory here. I'm glad I didn't let that put me off, though – because there is something kind of special going on here.
Tucker's songwriting is extremely tight and tidy – the tunes laden with fantastic hooks and the lyrics full of little existentially discomfiting visions of very ordinary situations that, while not quite burrowing as deep as, say, Nina Nastasia or Bill Callahan, nonetheless reach towards the miniaturist's skill of Raymond Carver or Alice Munro short stories. But equally important, this band can play like hell. For all their rather straight-laced, collegiate appearance, they sound like they have been playing the roughest roadhouses their whole life long. There's a real groove to this, the kind of Hammond-heavy country-soul sophistication that comes from Tucker's home town of Muscle Shoals, and suffuses the music of Al Green through and through, and it makes this album an understated joy to listen to. Indie-schmindie country it is not.
Overleaf: watch the video for "Since Jimmy Came"