He told me, “You just worry about writing them songs leaving everything else to me” Said, “Your voice might be too genuine and your song’s a little too sincereĬan you sing a little more about outlaws and the way things used to be?” Well that label man said, “Son now can you sing a little bit more clear?” And yet, and yet, the album kicks off with a song called “Life Ain’t Fair and the World Is Mean,” which kicks off with Simpson roaring this: And thus did the rapturous comparisons to Waylon Jennings and so forth rain down from the heavens, and indeed, compared to the sound and fury to come, High Top Mountain feels like it’s transmitting from a different galaxy entirely. How the hell did we get here? This is country music’s putative outlaw savior? This is the guy, in fact, who won the Best Country Album Grammy in 2017? (His third album, 2016’s A Sailor’s Guide to Earth, was in fact also up for Album of the Year, though it got squashed by Adele, as were we all.) It is instructive and also quite amusing to return now to Simpson’s debut, 2013’s High Top Mountain, a juke-joint riot of weeping pedal steel and furious twang and his own endearingly bombastic baritone. ![]() ![]() It’s pretty rad and absolutely, gloriously baffling. (QOTSA is a major influence here, both the extra-robotic old stuff and extra-funky newer stuff.) While this guitar solo rages on, the Netflix anime flick also out Friday, if you were curious, kicks off with a leering villain in a fancy suit invading a monastery with a pistol and blowing the heads off various monks and whatnot, all while spraying clouds of nefarious purple mist about. Sound & Fury’s opening track, “Ronin,” kicks off with trudging footsteps, a quick spin through a car-radio dial, and a roaring engine that dead-ends into a lengthy, blazing guitar solo, the muscle and grit and studly lost-highway ambiance recalling nothing so much as Queens of the Stone Age’s 2002 hard-rock masterpiece Songs for the Deaf. “So close the door behind you.” That’s on your way out, not your way in. “It’s gettin’ hard to find a good friend,” he observes. The 41-minute album (and anime film!) is bizarre and unexpected and spectacularly hostile and quite a good time so long as you accept that Simpson would love to see the baffled look on your face, too. ![]() “This town’s gettin’ crowded / Truth’s been shrouded / Think it’s time to change up the sound,” Simpson warns earlier in the song, and Sound & Fury is, indeed, a sleazy and industrial-strength Rock ’n’ Roll record, a dystopian update of ZZ Top–style swamp boogie from a charismatically standoffish guy who’s got middle fingers and knows how to use them. ![]() This hard pivot was definitely not somebody else’s suggestion. “I love to say no to all the yes-men / Just to see the look on their face,” crows country-music disruptor Sturgill Simpson on a pulverizing new tune that is literally titled “Make Art Not Friends.” And what I’d really love right now, if he wouldn’t mind, is a detailed list of every single stupid industry suggestion the Kentucky native has said no to in the past six years of defiant semi-stardom, such that his fourth album, Friday’s Sound & Fury, is accompanied by a blood-soaked Netflix anime film that bears the same name and is in fact so disruptive that he’s no longer making country music at all.
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