Golden throated and soaked through with southern charm, Hunter Watts would be the face of popular country music if the genre wasn’t all topsy turvy, or helter skelter, or ass backwards, or I don’t know what.
Maybe I’m not the best person to comment on a genre of music that in most regards isn’t my thing, but I have taste, and I know a damn good song when I hear it, and Hunter Watts is capable of writing one. Many, actually.
My kind of country is Townes Van Zandt, or the soundtrack to Nashville, or Harry Smith’s collection for Folkways. If you’ve read any of my reviews or know me as a person or an artist, you know that I favor depth of emotion over all else. You also know that, for the most part, I detest cliches, and modern country seems to have gone off the rails in that department.
Watts is different. He turns a witty phrase, plumbs the depths of heartache with ingenuity and charm, and injects just enough oddball energy to keep you on the edge of your seat. My hope is (again, maybe I’m ignorant in this regard) that there is such a thing as a self-perceived underground country scene in which artists like Watt battle it out with other immensely talented troubadours to be the next “big’ thing that only the kool kids know about.
Not that I support elitism. It’s just that mainstream music still largely sucks, and the truly talented folk continue to labor on the margins. It has been that way for as long as I can remember. So I rail about it every now and then as I write reviews that help people scream into the void (heh heh).
But…to the heart of the matter. This EP sounds incredible. Meaning the LP itself, at 45 rpm, is lush, artifact free, and spills like warm honey from your speakers. Pure quality, which is the sense that I’m getting matters from the folks at Valentine Recording Studios.
I’m going to take a stab in the dark here, based mainly on an investigation of the VRS website, and say that this album was recorded to 2” analog tape through a vintage console. It makes sense, given that there is a cohesiveness that tape brings to the proceedings, a cohesiveness very much evident in Watts’ seven songs.
The artist moves through variations on a country style with aplomb, but the analog nature of the proceedings helps glue Watts’ disparate ideas into a cohesive whole. That whole includes the earwormingly catchy “Not Anymore,” a song whose inarguable appeal siddles up to you like the The Stranger to The Dude in The Big Lebowski.
Gosh all get out if the tunes on this fine EP aren’t awash in hi-fi ready, lazy Sunday, inner monologue adventuring grounded through and through by love and life and pure human experience. Watts, pictured on the album cover as a slightly dusted, dazed, and disheveled dude about town, is the perfect post drunk companion when you need one.
