Review Summary: The sounds of yesteryear, in carbon-copy
I hate to say it, but there’s little that Colter’s been doing since his debut that actually adds to the country music conversation in the way the likes of Honey Harper or Willi Carlisle do. Rather Colter, along with other more carbon-copy traditionalists like Daniel Romano, is content to make his music a weird little simulacrum of the country western of the 60s and 70s, pulling the threads out of some fantasy world in which Urban Cowboy and rhinestone Stetsons had never been a thing and reweaving them into the perfect nostalgic image of the so-called country album. It’s a deeply reactionary take on the style, and given what Dierks and Morgan Wallen are churning out one that seems pretty justified. Really, who can blame anyone for wanting to take the genre in a direction that, at least on the surface, seems more
real that the green-screen backroad pop dominating the airwaves?
But for all that’s lamentable about the current state of the mainstream country scene, there’s something to be said for those more underground artists that are able to take its tropes and push them in new directions. When the likes of Orville Peck and (alright I’m stretching) Wednesday are able to take the trappings of country music and say something new with them, what we see is the advancement of the style, an evolution in keeping with the times. Colter too, at one point, seemed as though he was tentatively moving in a darker, moodier take on trad-country sounds, something that jived so well with his slightly put-upon basso profundo, but whether from some fear of being inauthentic or just from a total embrace of nostalgia, Colter’s recent music has become less a new take on old sounds and more just those old sounds for new ears. And for the most part, Colter’s done it more than competently enough to just coast on pure enjoyability.
Little Songs is no different, a collection of strongly penned and heartfelt tunes packaged and dolled up to an uncanny resemblance of the old-school country albums now languishing in the dollar vinyl section of thrift stores continent-wide.
The problem, and it’s a big one, is that Colter’s eventually going to have to figure out where he’s going from here if he doesn’t want to get completely bogged down in stagnant reminiscence for the rest of his career. There were warning signs on
Songs of the Plains, and
Western Swings was a headlong pratfall into that empty sentimentality. If
Little Songs doesn’t completely represent that point, it’s only because Colter’s showing a bit of zing, a bit of playful liveliness in his worship of all the old country tropes. Little moments of lightheartedness, playful winks as Colter drops a line like “the whiskey bottle is thirty-two buck, the big prairie moon is free, so who is a dumber son of a bitch, the little coyotе or me”. Colter certainly still has a knack for a turn of phrase, and he certainly knows his way around a tune, hell he's still one of the best pure country songwriters in the game right now. But we’ve been seeing, here, and on
Western Swings, that if he doesn’t start finding some way to translate his music into something resembling a direction, we’re only going to be seeing ever-diminishing returns for his bi-yearly sarsaparilla nostalgia baths.
The verve and effortless ability that Colter’s band is bringing are another of the album’s saving graces, and the one that continues to make Colter’s music stand as at the very minimum a respectable example of the style. Each little dobro lick or fiddle solo is almost eerily precise in its aping of the country of 50 years ago, and carries all the charisma and swing of any of the finer backing bands of the genre’s heyday. Colter himself is more than a master of the country format, picking his well-worn metaphors and scenes with the precision of an old master. His voice of course remains the standout quality of his music, and if it’s not so theatrical as it was on his debut, it’s still basically the world-weary personification of sunset in Saskatchewan. Colter and his band may just be the sum of their parts, but those parts are of a quality that is pretty much unimpeachable.
So if in the meantime, for however long this leg of his career is going to continue, Colter is content with just filling the big empty with little songs, more power to him. It’s not a bad direction by any means, hell, when it’s this staid and faithful it isn’t much of a direction at all to be honest. If Colter got a little gunshy of being called out for the supposed pretense of his debut’s gothic leanings and his put-upon vocal depth, that doesn’t mean he still can’t find some new direction to turn, some way to bring his sound into something approaching a work that sheds some light on where country music can go from the newfound jumping-off point of the 60s and 70s. If he doesn’t, why wouldn’t anyone listening to this, nodding along in appreciation and enjoyment, just decide to pause this halfway through and put on some Haggard or Jennings? Which, on my first listen, is exactly what I did.
