Sturgill Simpson - Sound & Fury

The Guardian 100

(Elektra Records)
Another big shift in direction for Simpson, with anime visuals, glam rock, disco and grunge ornamenting never-more-country lyrics: it’s extraordinary

It seems almost beside the point to note that Sturgill Simpson’s fourth album sounds nothing like its predecessors, as his previous three albums didn’t sound much like each other either. His self-funded 2013 debut, High Top Mountain, suggested the arrival of an arch-traditionalist, a former serviceman and railroad worker, whose vision of country music was rooted in that of artists who balked at Nashville’s tendency to slather everything in a coat of gloss: a defiantly retro reanimation of the late 70s “outlaw country” of Waylon Jennings or Hank Williams Jr. But its successor, Metamodern Sounds in Country Music, was a kind of psychedelic opus, sprinkled with paeans to LSD and DMT – “woke up this morning and decided to kill my ego … gonna break on through and blast off to the Bardo,” opened Just Let Go – frequently set to music that matched: Mellotron and wah-wah guitars, vocals drenched in spaced-out echo.

Pitchfork 72

The fourth album from the country outlaw is another left-turn with synth-rock at its scuzziest, boogie-rock at its cheesiest, all held together by Simpson’s fearless songwriting.

The Guardian 60

(Elektra)

Of late, any number of pop artists – Gaga, Miley, Justin Timberlake – have made country-adjacent albums, perhaps as rootsy succour in difficult times, or perhaps as heartland-courting endeavours for the Trumpian era. Country singer Sturgill Simpson, meanwhile, won a Grammy for his last record, A Sailor’s Guide to Earth (2016), which champed at the bit of the genre, employing retro soul heroes the Dap-Kings as backing band, and covering Nirvana. This one bucks even harder. Simpson was once a navy man stationed in Japan, which partially explains why Sound & Fury comes with an accompanying Netflix manga film. The album, meanwhile, was written in the echo of Simpson spinning Black Sabbath, Eminem and the Cars on repeat.

Enthrallingly, it often sounds a bit like a Queens of the Stone Age album produced by Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys: rock, broadly, but funky with it, as on Best Clockmaker on Mars. A Good Look stretches country radio furthest: it’s not far off disco, with a mosquito-y synth line played loud, to frighten the horses even more. Make Art Not Friends powers up with an analogue synth interlude that slowly beefs up into scorched-earth power-pop. Throughout, a commitment to heartfelt songcraft remains the most “country” thing about Sound & Fury.