Tyler Childers Can I Take My Hounds To Heaven?
Lots of good new music this month. A posthumous release from Dr. John, Things Happen That Way, is especially good. Featuring guests like Willie and Lukas Nelson, Katie Pruitt, and others, it’s a collection of standards and originals that spotlight all the different facets of his music that we’ve loved over the years; funk, soul, jazz, etc. It’s a very welcome surprise on this month’s list.
The record I’ve been listening to most this month is The Beths’ new offering, Expert In A Dying Field. I’d never heard of The Beths, but this is the New Zealand band’s third record, and it made me go back and listen to the previous two. I probably prefer the second — Jump Rope Gazers — to this newest one, but since its release I’ve listened to Expert nearly every day on my commute. Definitely a little more rocking than my usual fare, but I’m loving it.
My main pick for the month, though, is Tyler Childers’s ambitious new project, Can I Take My Hounds To Heaven? I’ve never encountered this kind of concept album before. It’s a three-record set comprised of the same 8 songs recorded in three different versions. The Hallelujah versions are more somber, and fleshed out with organ. Then we’re given the Jubilee versions, which are stripped down, funky, and perhaps more like what we may have expected from what we’ve heard of Childers in the past. Finally, the Joyful Noise versions treat the songs with all manner of audio samples, loops, spoken word passages, etc. Childers is easily among my favorite artists today, and I find this release to be nothing short of fascinating.
Get some music in your ears, everybody!
