HISS GOLDEN MESSENGER : QUIETLY BLOWING IT

HISS GOLDEN MESSENGER : QUIETLY BLOWING IT

Way Back In The Way Back
The Great Mystifier
Mighty Dollar
Quietly Blowing It
It Will If We Let It
Hardlytown
If It Comes In The Morning
Glory Strums (Loneliness Of The Long-Distance Runner)
Painting Houses
Angels In The Headlights
Sanctuary

Label : Merge Records

Release Date : June 25, 2021

Length : 39:15

Review (AllMusic) : M.C. Taylor, the vocalist and songwriter behind Hiss Golden Messenger, was struggling with some heavy emotional baggage when he was making 2019's Terms of Surrender, written and recorded as he grieved the death of his father and experienced a deep slide into depression. A little more than six months after the album was released, the rest of the world sunk into the doldrums as a global pandemic and a divisive culture held sway, and it's comforting that Taylor is here to commiserate with us all. 2021's Quietly Blowing It was written between March and June 2020, when Taylor spent his days in a tiny home studio with his guitar and his thoughts. Without dealing with the specifics of the litany of disasters that dominated that year, the tenor of this album reflects a world that struggles to understand just what's going on and why. The uphill battle of simply getting by informs "Hardlytown," the growing divide between the haves and have nots is at the core of "Mighty Dollar," mortality and survival walk side by side in "Sanctuary," and the struggle to keep hoping without knowing if it will ever pay off is the theme behind "If It Comes in the Morning." Quietly Blowing It is the work of a man who has far more questions than answers, and he's sadly short on concrete advice at a time when we could all use it. But while the lyrics of these songs confront the realities of a cruel world, the music is there to offer all the solace Taylor knows how to give. The melodies are not always upbeat, but they have the warmth and determined compassion of a hug from an old friend, and the arrangements dress the tunes in sounds that recall the rootsy end of '70s soft rock but with an emotional eloquence that's often very beautiful, even when his characters are chasing a happiness that's out of their grasp. On Quietly Blowing It, M.C. Taylor reminds us he knows how we feel, and that he feels the same way; perhaps that helps only so much, but there's a lot to be said for a friendly voice during a hard time, and that's just what this album delivers.

Review (Pitchfork) : Despite its grand scope and good intentions, the latest album from M.C. Taylor is the sound of an artist beginning to repeat himself: lite music for dark times. FEATURED TRACKS: Play Track Sanctuary - Hiss Golden MessengerVia The crickets come in early on Quietly Blowing It, between the second and third songs. As the rustic, two-step rhythm of "The Great Mystifier" winds down, the guitars are replaced by the quiet burble of insects, a lonesome nighttime ambience interrupted by a lurch into the stumbling, country-funk dirge "Mighty Dollar." It's an odd bit of sequencing: a solitary sound bridging two songs that are the opposite of solitary. It's also a familiar bit of sequencing: M.C. Taylor used a similar backdrop on Hiss Golden Messenger's 2011 album Poor Moon and again on 2014's Lateness of Dancers. Those were daring arrangements, especially the latter, which found the North Carolina countryside to be a lively collaborator. By contrast, the crickets on Quietly Blowing It sound more like shorthand, a nod to what worked before. This attempt to transport you to some stretch of woods or to a front porch at sunset instead only reminds you that this is an artist beginning to repeat himself. It's not just the crickets: Listening to Hiss Golden Messenger's ninth proper album in 13 years (not counting live releases, joint albums, and a box set), it's hard to shake the sense that you've heard all of this before. "Sanctuary," for example, opens with a tentative acoustic strum before the rest of the band comes crashing in, but that trick worked better on previous albums, where it depicted an artist who'd come to a crossroads, agonized over his path, then set on his way with a new spring in his step. Here it just sounds like a thing that happens in a Hiss Golden Messenger song. The title track recalls "Devotion" from 2013's Haw and so many other airy ballads he's written in the past. Even the album cover looks like a mashup of Lateness of Dancers and Hallelujah Anyhow. Except for two co-writes with Anaïs Mitchell and Gregory Alan Isakov, Taylor wrote most of the songs alone at his North Carolina home and recorded in his small office studio. He then recruited an impressive roster of headline guests, including Taylor Goldsmith from Dawes and legendary country guitarist/producer Buddy Miller. Together, they worked up some moments of exuberance and experimentation, like the rousing ending of "Way Back in the Way Back" and the Nebraska-style harmonica that haunts "Glory Strums (Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner)." On "Angels in the Headlights," Taylor ties up a sun-bleached pedal steel, a drunken piano, and a nylon-string guitar with baling twine, creating something both strange and affecting. But that short song is a parenthetical aside on an album full of grandiose declarations about the world today. This is a statement album, broad and populist to a fault. Taylor writes about big issues-income inequality, political corruption, a society fraying at its edges-but these complex matters are undermined by the rote uplift in his songs, an optimism assumed but never really earned. On previous albums, he fashioned songs into question marks, interrogating God and himself, all with the understanding that faith has more to do with struggle than resolution. His songs were so relatable for being so vividly private: a still, small voice amplified through vintage speakers. The songs on Quietly Blowing It, however, are more explanatory than exploratory, treating pat pronouncements as pop profundities because he already knows where he stands in relation to these issues. They're already settled in his head and in his heart, and he wants you to know it. "Feeling bad, feeling blue, can't get out of my own head," he sings on "Sanctuary," a would-be anthem of perseverance. "But I know how to sing about it." And yet, the verses sound clipped, the call-and-response on the chorus nowhere near as rousing as you expect from the man who wrote "Heart Like a Levee" and "Saturday's Song." The payoff never comes. Good intentions don't guarantee good art. In this case, writing such big songs erases much of the nuance in Taylor's lyrics, reducing those thorny questions to bumper-sticker declarations. "Up with the mountains, down with the system. that keeps us in chains," he sings on opener "Way Back in the Way Back." He sends John Prine into the great beyond with the cringeworthy farewell: "Handsome Johnny had to go, child." There's a clunker line in every song, and "Mighty Dollar" is nothing but. This is art that strives and strains so hard for meaning and weight that it threatens to become meaningless and weightless: lite music for dark times. Taylor includes in the liner notes a quote from U.S. poet laureate Joy Harjo: "Then, you must do this: help the next person find their way through the dark." Those are wise words and for any artist a noble calling, but Taylor is so concerned about lighting the way for others that he's stumbling over his own feet.

Review (Rolling Stone) : Over the past half-decade, M.C. Taylor has released four new albums (and a slew of outtakes compilations and live records) under the moniker of his country-soul recording outfit, Hiss Golden Messenger. But more impressive than the sheer quantity of the North Carolina singer-songwriter's output is the degree of spiritual sensitivity, compositional craft, and high-stakes emotional urgency Taylor has been able to bring to each collection in such quick succession. Rarely do songwriters who release original music so often manage to make each release feel as necessary as Taylor - And no Hiss Golden Messenger record has ever felt more necessary than his new LP, Quietly Blowing It. Taylor's mournful meditation on a year of loss, grief, and upheaval may be more sparse and sedated than the 2019 Brad Cook and Aaron Dessner-assisted Terms of Surrender, but this offering of solemn joy and hopeful sorrow is also the most timely record of his career. Written and recorded largely during the earliest months of the pandemic in the spring and summer of 2020, Quietly Blowing It maintains an ever-present sense of calamity, both personal and collective. Inner turmoil bleeds into a sense of shared tragedy and vice versa throughout its 11 songs: On the title track, the song's narrator, dealing with interpersonal unrest, glances at the television and notices that "there's a riot goin' on" outside the walls of his home as well as inside. On "Sanctuary," meanwhile, the comfort of loving embrace offers respite amidst devastation. Taylor has always excelled at turning everyday moments into occasions for unfussy existential reflection. He does this with the most concise, cutting couplets of his career: On "Glory Strums (Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner)," jogging becomes an occasion for deep, dark self-reflection ("I know that there's good in me/Why's it such a hard time?"). On "It Will If We Let It," Taylor reflects on the cruel selfishness that artists can so easily inflict on their loved ones: "Were you happy?/I ignored it/I was telling/other stories." As one might expect from a record made during a time of intense isolation, much of the music on Quietly Blowing It feels solitary, subdued, and contemplative, calling to mind, at times, the cloistered folk of earlier Hiss records like 2012's Poor Moon. But Taylor has grown immensely as a melodicist and arranger (he self-produced this album) in the ensuing decade, and the LP, which features contributions from longtime companions like Josh Kaufman and Scott Hirsch, is full of the collaborative warmth of recent Hiss landmarks like Heart Like a Levee. Faced with a period of prolonged seclusion, Taylor turned, as ever, to his record collection. On Quietly Blowing It he embraces his role as roots synthesizer, conjuring and quoting everyone from Sly Stone and Curtis Mayfield to Rod Stewart and John Prine. All those musical references can help make it seem like Quietly Blowing It is offering prophetic wisdom even when Taylor is merely just trying to write himself out of hard times. "You gotta let someone in," as he puts it on the title track. "That's all that'll save you."