For some reason, I find Saint Cloud ... What kinda name of that. —Jade Gomez, Jason Isbell isn’t the kind of guy you’d think of as haunted, but he’s surrounded by ghosts on his new album. This album has a bloodied, ambitious heart on its sleeve. The fifth full-length release for the indie music project of Katie Crutchfield was produced by Brad Cook. The vocals on Saint Cloud are Katie Crutchfield's most polished, but good vocals don't necessarily make for good music. But the cheekier, less scientific answer to that query, though, is the human voice. She embraces the messiness of growing up and taking responsibility for one’s actions and composes the apex of everything she’s accomplished thus far. Before that: Extraordinary Machine, in 2005. That’s the heart of “P-Town” specifically, but the spiritual relief derived from rock ’n’ roll and Americana makes up Walking Proof’s whole. Too often she directs her ire toward an unnamed lover she's over and done with, or, as a variation on the theme, apologizes to the man she loves for how crummy a person she is. We’ve experienced an onslaught of live-streamed performances and home-recorded albums—churned out at a time when artists have lost most of their revenue streams. Joe S. Harrington once wrote that the genius of Steely Dan’s Katy Lied was that the weakest song was slotted leadoff. Adopting a free and easy Americana style marked by both twangy guitars and dreamy keys, the songs here are at once deeply intimate and broadly accessible, like selections from an alternative universe where modern mainstream country radio isn’t all pandering, homogenized slop. That is, if you’re lucky enough to come through it with your wits intact and with enough perspective to see the journey as something more than a bumpy ride over rough terrain. In other words, it’s not just the material that’s timeless on the new self-titled album from folk supergroup Bonny Light Horseman. To join these ranks is both a blessing and a curse. —Eric R. Danton, It’s a special thing to watch a promising artist rise to meet the moment in front of them. Like any good storyteller, Isbell creates characters, and he has a storyteller’s ability to bring them to life by infusing them with enough of his own experiences, be it sobriety or fatherhood, to make their struggles and small triumphs resonate. Listening to Heaven for a Tortured Mind will make you question your own memories of the singer, because they’ve never sounded more immediate, more relatable or more desirously messy. Later, after their record was finished and the post-punk act was touring in Europe, they received the news that Clawson had taken his own life. 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