Barton Carroll – The Lost One
You can forgive an album for getting a little sticky towards the end when the first two-thirds of it are as good as this. I’m still in a surprisingly country vein at the moment, although this is less smooth than the excellent Christopher Denny.
There’s plenty of archetypal, wistful country music here, at times witty and at times angry or even downright unnerving (Burning Red & Blue). Slipping from vaguely close to the sort of dustbowl drifter tale that I seem to fall for at every opportunity, to a kind of gentle, rolling alt-country that you could even imagine being wasted on Radio 2, it flirts with being a bit nice, but always maintains enough nasty to keep well away from the saccharine.
It’s odd actually, it’s by no means a sweet, easy country album, but at the same time it rarely has that kind of tense edge that would mark an album as ‘indie’ or ‘alternative’ in that vague and badly-defined classification system I keep stashed away in my gin-addled brain. He doesn’t write happy songs at all, but there’s little bitterness in his gorgeous delivery which makes for an oddly detached listen. It sounds more like he’s reading someone else’s stories than recounting anything that might have scarred him personally earlier in his life.
The album does tail off a little towards the end, but to complain about that would be a bit mean-spirited, because until tracks like the mealy Ramona come along, the rest of the album is such a joy you can’t begrudge him the slight lack of stamina. And, of course, the delivery is good enough that they aren’t jarring anyway, and you can drift off to do whatever it was you were doing before.
Barton Carroll – Brooklyn Girl, You’re Going to Be My Bride
Barton Carroll – Burning Red & Blue
