Those to come
You don't have to worry about Chriss Sutherland playing fast and loose with his uncertainties. Worried Love stares down the confusion of settling down like a series of effusive, stream-of-consciousness diary entries. His flinching is unflinching. This frantic honesty is apparent from the positively Dylanesque opening chords of "Flaking the Hands," as Sutherland's hopes, doubts, and concerns spew out in bursts of varying sizes and methods. He stretches out measures to fit verbally and symbolically acrobatic lines like "it's immensely amazing, a feat worth hands falling apart" or "the opener must conserve the nerve to survey the scene"; but he doesn't stray from a short, simple rhyme when it suits his frame of mind ("This is not a game/'Cos we are all the same/And we should know that by now").
That opener and the sublime follow-up "What Are We Gonna Do Now?" are Worried Love at its best, as Sutherland and his supporting players (including the cast of Fire on Fire, Jerusha Robinson, and Ron Harrity, who engineered most of the album) repurpose country tropes to suit the songwriter's anguished subject matter. "What Are We Gonna Do Now?"'s postmodern refrain — "I never thought the same would be the same again" — feels positively old-fashioned next to the gliding 4/4 tempo of Tom Kovacevic's saloon piano. Colleen Kinsella's backing vocals create a backdrop of gospel hope, until they're consumed by the maelstrom of Ron Harrity's guitar pedals.
Elsewhere, Sutherland continues in a vein familiar to those who have seen him perform in the past few years, mixing haunting, repetitive ballads and the odd flamenco song in between epic folk tracks. Sutherland's fleet-footed, sandpaper-rough vocal athletics keep the album's two Spanish-language numbers (one, "Volando Voy," features Micah Blue Smaldone on scene-stealing Carlos Santana licks) from feeling too detached from his profuse folk confessionals. Worried Love offers up three of those, six-plus minute geysers that seem to address every facet of the singer's deep doubts and even deeper endurance. The best of these is the nearly ten-minute album closer, "Hey Justice," whose final four minutes find Sutherland, backed by an intoning Greek chorus, repeating his ultimate plea: "Dare me/Push me/Save me." Worried Love is a long and long-winded trip — too long for some — but Sutherland's songwriting, always primal and reflective, is more rich and fruitful than it's ever been.
The quiet storm
Neko Case's recently released Middle Cyclone, recorded in her Vermont barn-house, exhibits a more nuanced evolution than Oldham's and Sutherland's latest albums, but the sometime-New Pornographer has never been a quick read. Fox Confessor Brings the Flood (2006, Anti-), her solo artistic breakthrough, found her exploring new territories: abbreviated, nostalgic waltzes ("That Teenage Feeling"); ominous choral ballads ("Dirty Knife"); and full-on gospel ("John Saw That Number"). Structurally, Middle Cyclone is more coherent than Fox Confessor — those experiments and her country-rock background are fully integrated into most songs here — and if the lyrics are easier (read: less fun) to unpack (essays can and have been written about Fox Confessor's use of Ukrainian mythological imagery), they're also more immediate and vulnerable.
