10

A Truly Genuine Record

This release was recorded on tape and feels more genuine than any pop country I've heard for a long time. Carlile's voice on her single, The Story, sounds broken and wrong in all the right ways. She's made an album that doesn't suck in a genre that does, and I applaud her for it. If you like country music that's made for country radio, you should listen to this album and embrace all the parts of it that sound amateur, because that's where authenticity's salvation lies. Then you should listen to Patsy Cline and realise that life never ever works right, and then you'll like Brandi Carlile even more.

Carlile is brave enough to release songs where things are "technically wrong but emotionally right", and she deserves every accolade she gets because of it. There are aspects of commercial production that are necessary for any signed artist, but she still manages to maintain self-hood amidst a money hungry population of industry officials. There are stupid choruses in her music, but there are also moments when real pain is translated into really good music, and that's what the country genre is about. I almost want her to suffer poverty and failure for another few years so that when she makes her next album it's so tortured and wonderful that regular people can come alive again when she plays. Carlile has it all, and if she continues with her lo-fi tapes and strips herself of even more production, she's going to make the world's heart break in the same perfectly flawed way her voice does when she's singing honestly.