Hiss Golden Messenger - Terms of Surrender

The Guardian 80

(Merge)

The prolific MC Taylor is a North Carolina-based musician with a sonorous but easy-going mission: to transform his inner questing into what sounds like mellow southern country-rock tunes, delivered in the off-hand manner of Dylan and cut through with humid soul. Taylor’s spiritually restless ballads remain down-to-earth as he tries to square the lifestyle of a touring troubadour with his responsibilities as a father, husband and human being.

Terms of Surrender finds him grappling with more doubt and self-excoriation than usual, adding more roll, more electric piano and more textural detail to his already expansive roots music. A loose, wet sloshing opens Old Enough to Wonder Why, on which Taylor’s falsetto combines with uneasy instrumentation. Whip, meanwhile, essays a kind of curdled spiritual funk.

The Guardian 80

(Merge)
MC Taylor’s 11th album was written in depression but finds notes of hope – and a musical sound that fuses old with new

Eleven albums in as many years suggest MC Taylor has no issues with writers’ block, that he must be in a constant state of productivity. Yet Terms of Surrender arrived not through clarity, but what Taylor has called a “fog of depression” – he wrote the songs, he said, as therapy, creating “a last will and testament”. That might lead you to suspect Terms of Surrender of being unlistenably bleak, but as often as not, Taylor is searching for hope rather than wallowing in despair. On Happy Birthday, Baby, he’s singing to his daughter, and managing not to be painfully mawkish, even when offering up a rhyme he wants her to repeat when he’s far away on the road; he follows that with the road itself, on Down at the Uptown, where the quotidian events of the touring musician – “Someone’s in the bathroom sleeping off a bad one” – make him realise “it was a real live world and I want to live in it”.

Pitchfork 65

Working without his longtime collaborator Scott Hirsch, M.C. Taylor enlists guests Jenny Lewis and Aaron Dessner as he explores the heaviest questions and realizes there are no answers.