B​-​Sides
by Adrianne Lenker & Buck Meek

From Mercury 02/11/2022 18:16 | #281132

This is also damn fine! As for general personal enjoyment, this is a step down from A-Sides, BUT some of these songs are absolute empathy-enflaming-masterworks. Namely, the opner “Angels” is one of the most touching songs I’ve heard in a long time. This track captures that lost, feeble, overwhelmed feeling of a child looking at a world so big and so confused. It’s heartbreakingly touching and sad, while still maintaining a vertain gorgeous and glistening youthful hope. The refrain about hoping angels can hear her, but how it sometimes it feels like nobody’s listening… jesus. This makes me cry and may be the best song on these 2 EPs.

Other stand outs are the very Dylan-esque in theme, almost modernization of the Minnesota kid coming to NYC track “New York City.” – also it must be said that I adore Lenker and while she is no Dylan in my mind (yet) it is cool and kind of wild that Lenker and Dylan share certain similarities in background, separated by 50 years… gorgeous and wonderous the world can be ?…

And finally, the closing track “Wallet”, the one song sang by Meek is quite beautiful. It has that old school Greenwich village ish mix of blues and folk and down-on-your-luck outlaw sorta kinda vibe. Also, the very poetic and understated song “A Better Time to Meet” is awesome. Can you tell I love this stuff?

There is a part at the end of “A Better Time To Meet” when you can hear Adrianne talking quietly to Buck and that shifts seamlessly to the beginning of the next track “Carolina” when she asks “Can I try this?” and Buck says “sure” and I don’t know why I love that little moment so much, it just puts me into this recording, like I’m there sharing in this little collab. The song itself, “Carolina” is pretty as well.

Lenker’s vocals shine on this collection more than ever. She really owns this material and gets into the old timey vocal details and the high pitched notes are all nailed gorgeously. I still prefer the vocal sounds of her later work, when she embraced that idiosyncratic delivery she has, but this is also quite mesmerizing. For an example of what I mean with this showy and beautiful vocal delivery, listen to the chorus of “New York City”, its awesome.

I will say the thing that kept coming to mind that I missed was simply the harmonizing. The coolest and warmest and best parts of the first EP A-Sides was the loving, tender harmony work between these 2. I am not sure why that was stripped completely off this one. Perhaps this is just meant to be the flip side, another angle on this fruitful collab, but still its missed. The songs are just as good or right there in the same range at least. The music is the same acoustic guitars and vocals and … that is it. I love that sound and the way they execute it and the way they flesh out these tunes with such an austere presentation is impressive and a testament to these 2’s talent.

Overall, I love this. A solid 8.1/10. This 8/10 alongside the 9.1 of the first one, and combined into what comes to a proper album length, makes this legitimately OVERALL chart-level stuff for me personally. If I were to listen to these back-to-back as an album (there is indeed a compilation called A-Sides and Besides which I believe is just that) I think this may be one of the best folk albums I’ve heard. It felt like coming home to my musical roots. I feel like this is still probably my favorite, go-to, “style” of music. Simple, folky, well-written expression of human stuff like love and sadness and self-reflective and romantic. This was amazing. I am kind of in love.