Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit – Weathervanes (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 01:00:37 minutes | 753 MB | Genre: Rock, Country Rock
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Southeastern Records
New album from Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit, tackling issues such as gun violence, the opioid crisis, and women’s rights all through Isbell’s signature song writing lens.
Weathervanes is a collection of grown-up songs: Songs about adult love, about change, about the danger of nostalgia and the interrogation of myths, about cruelty and regret and redemption. Life and death songs played for and by grown ass people. Some will make you cry alone in your car and others will make you sing along with thousands of strangers in a big summer pavilion, united in the great miracle of being alive.
A Jason Isbell record always lands like a decoder ring in the ears and hearts of his audience, a soundtrack to his world and magically to theirs, too. Weathervanes carries the same revelatory power.
This is a storyteller at the peak of his craft, observing his fellow wanderers, looking inside and trying to understand, reducing a universe to four minutes. He shrinks life small enough to name the fear and then strip it away, helping his listeners make sense of how two plus two stops equalling four once you reach a certain age – and carry a certain amount of scars.
Jason Isbell has established himself as one of the most respected and celebrated songwriters of his generation. The North Alabama native possesses an incredible penchant for identifying and articulating some of the deepest, yet simplest, human emotions, and turning them into beautiful poetry through song. Isbell sings of the everyday human condition with thoughtful, heartfelt, and sometimes brutal honesty.
The record features the rolling thunder of Isbell’s fearsome 400 Unit, who’ve earned a place in the rock ‘n’ roll cosmos alongside the greatest backing ensembles, as powerful and essential to the storytelling as The E Street Band or the Wailers.
Isbell broke through in 2013 with the release of Southeastern. His next two albums, Something More Than Free (2015) and The Nashville Sound (2017), won Grammy Awards for Best Americana Album and Best American Roots Song. Isbell’s song ‘Maybe It’s Time’ was featured in the 2019 reboot of A Star Is Born.
His most recent full-length album, Reunions (2020), is a critically acclaimed collection of ten songs that showcased an artist at the height of his powers and a band fully charged with creativity and confidence. The roots of Weathervanes go back into the isolation of the pandemic and to Isbell’s recent time on the set as an actor on Martin Scorsese’s upcoming film Killers of the Flower Moon.
Jason Isbell certainly knows about the elation that comes from success and validation. He has yet to stumble in a solo career that began in 2007, a kind of roll most musicians only dream of. But on Weathervanes, his first album of originals since 2020’s just-as-the-pandemic-struck Reunions, Isbell returns to examining what he calls “boundaries” and the sticky riddle of how to “keep the ability to love somebody fully and completely while you’re growing into an adult and learning how to love yourself.” An expressive vocalist who’s at his best singing his own songs (the mark of all great songwriters), Isbell is one of the craftiest, most honest songwriters working today. His genius lies in his ability to mix troubled tales of sharp-eyed realism with a fascination for humanity’s cruelty, regret, and redemption. As a master lyricist, he can open this record with a raw tune like “Death Wish,” because of couplets like, “Did you ever love a woman with a death wish/ Something in her eyes like flipping off a light switch” and “Who’s gonna save you, who’s left to pray to/ What’s the difference in a breakdown and a breakthrough?”
While he has a poet’s eye for details like “thick cut bacon on Texas toast” and “Got square-toed boots so he ain’t for real/ Wouldn’t last five minutes on a pedal steel” (“Strawberry Woman”), his storytelling succeeds because of the grace with which he encapsulates emotional quagmires as he does in the nervous brushes-on-cymbals hymn “If You Insist”: “We’re running out of options/ I’ll wait outside the door/ If you insist on being lonely/ I might wait a minute more.” Occasionally, there’s even a touch of humor as in the opening lines of “Cast Iron Skillet”: “Don’t wash the cast iron skillet/ Don’t drink and drive, you’ll spill it.” Given his rising celebrityhood it’s not surprising the film business would come calling; Isbell has a part in Martin Scorsese’s latest film, Killers of the Flower Moon. Watching the director gave the songwriter a new vision for collaboration, and here his co-producing partnership with Matt Pence (Centro-matic, Justin Townes Earle, Elle King) resulted in a sound that is full and rich without surrendering to excessive loudness. His sensitive, well-oiled band the 400 Unit, with stalwarts Derry deBorja (keyboards) and Sadler Vaden (guitar), ably add atmosphere and support Isbell throughout but especially on electrified rockers like the pounding “When We Were Close” and “This Ain’t It,” the latter echoing ’70s Southern rock by way of the Marshall Tucker Band. Listen closely, Isbell’s artistry continues. – Robert Baird
Tracklist:
1-1. Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit – Death Wish (04:30)
1-2. Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit – King of Oklahoma (05:02)
1-3. Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit – Strawberry Woman (04:10)
1-4. Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit – Middle of the Morning (04:40)
1-5. Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit – Save the World (05:09)
1-6. Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit – If You Insist (03:45)
1-7. Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit – Cast Iron Skillet (03:24)
1-8. Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit – When We Were Close (03:57)
1-9. Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit – Volunteer (04:05)
1-10. Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit – Vestavia Hills (04:31)
1-11. Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit – White Beretta (03:56)
1-12. Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit – This Ain’t It (06:14)
1-13. Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit – Miles (07:07)
