Twenty Sixteen is the number, part two

Best Americana Album

What is Americana? For the purposes of this round-up I take it to be music where a Country element is significant, though not necessarily wholly defining.  I think it was Harlan Howard who said Country was three chords and the truth.  That's enough of a definition.
Close contenders included Kurt Blau's Introducing, see a previous post, whose Fallin Rain was, for me, the best track of the year.  Some of the cover choices were very apposite for 2016, some tasty versions of great songs.  Also up there was The Jayhawks' Paging Mr Proust, an immediately engaging set of melodic songs, brilliantly off-kilter guitar solos (move over Nels Kline) and harmonies honed over decades.  But the Cultureberg Imaginary gong goes to Elizabeth Cook.
Cultureberg first became aware of Ms Cook by traditional means, via the car radio, just outside Exeter, as I recall.  Her song Sometimes It Takes Balls to be a Woman leaps off from its arresting title and sassily sashays it's way through gender conflict, a theme that is an essential ingredient in the country pie.  At Elizabeth Cook's kitchen table that pie may well be upturned upon a big hat, dripping gravy down a cowboy's cheek.  Hooked, Cultureberg snapped up the mother album "Balls", wherein music manners and mores were lambasted and lampooned.  The cover of The Velvet Underground's Sunday Morning was so beguiling and perfect you could not imagine it not having been countrified before.  An artist to watch.
Like the best artists worth keeping an eye on, she disappeared from gaze for a bit, now returning
with a new album Exodus of Venus, something of a departure.  If country music is a bureaucracy wherein the toiler must position themselves, Ms Cook has decided to head for the margins.  More recalibration than total overhaul, nonetheless largely gone are the whip-smart Loretta Lynn meets Dolly Parton observations and acoustic instruments, in are grunge guitars a la Todd Snider's Hard Working Americans.  Gone are snarky digs at Britney Spears, in are songs called Slow Pain and Methadone Blues.
If country is indeed the truth plus three chords, the best country deals with the drinking, cheating and everyday frustrations that underlies both Soap Opera and High Art with disarming honesty and wry wit.  It is what elevates Porter Wagoner's The Cold Hard Facts of Life, George Jones' He Stopped Loving Her Today or Loretta Lynn's Fist City into the pantheon, and though there aren't any songs with such a salty tang on Exodus of Venus (candidate for least country album title ever), the album mines thee topics that have fuelled the genre since the Carter Family.
The album is produced by Ms Cook's new paramour Dexter Green, who is also on guitar.  Draftees included are seasoned professionals like Matt Chamberlain on drums, who has played with Pearl Jam,
The Wallflowers, Tori Amos and Fiona Apple.  That mix of grunge and oestrogen should give you a taste of where the album is coming from.  Willie Weeks, who has played with everyone from the Stones and Clapton on down is on the bass guitar, and the sound is more Drive-By Truckers than Dollywood.  Slow Pain is organ and swampy guitar topped off with slide and only the duet with Patty Loveless on Straightjacket Love and the white trash indignation of Tabitha Tudor's Mama show echoes of previous records.  The drumming on Orange Blossom Trail could almost be Richie Hayward of Little Feat and the guitars are sharp and cutting on the least country title on the album, Broke Down in London on the M25.
Like all new releases there is a coherent backstory that is repeated throughout media pieces, somewhat unavoidable in Country music.  It covers Miss Cook's marriage breakup to Tim Carrol, her record label insisting she go into rehab despite her lack of a substance problem (no, me neither), deaths in the family, houses burning down, the gamut.  What elevates the record is its commitment to a somewhat uneasy listen and songs that seem to have had to be written rather than placed by the company.  Matthew Arnold, just after he moved to Nashville from Oxford over a hundred years ago, said "Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recalled in tranquility."  He did not comment about three chords and the truth, or indeed iambic pentameter and the truth.  Had he heard Exodus of Venus he may well have joined Cultureberg in toasting a country grunge hybrid which recalled life's little ups and downs in tranquility (or maybe in tumult,) producing a record which utilises Miss Cook's wit and pizzazz in a new way.