Album Reviews

After having spent a fair amount of his adult life in California, Grant-Lee Phillips decided to pick up his guitar and relocate to Nashville. Is it because of the move to Music City that his latest album sees him expanding on the Americana sounds of his last few albums? Could be, but I don’t have a direct view into the man’s brain so I couldn’t tell you to any degree of certainty.

Recorded at Dan Auerbach’s Easy Eye Studio with the help of Jerry Roe (drums) and Lex Price (bass), “The Narrows” is a collection of thirteen rootsy songs that bathe in a warm glow of reverb and which can’t be bothered to move any faster. Not that you’d want them to. The haunting “Smoke And Sparks”, “Taking On Weight In Hot Springs” and the gently swaying “No Mercy In July” are just fine moving along at the pace that they do.

With instrumentation mostly kept to a minimum, these songs are allowed plenty of room to breathe and while you couldn’t label them as instantly catchy, there are plenty of gorgeous melodies to be found throughout “The Narrows” that you will want to circle back to again and again.