Jason Isbell ‘Foxes in the Snow’ Review: Bearing Witness to Absence

Jason Isbell’s 2013 album Southeastern was a harrowing recounting of the singer-songwriter’s battle with habit. The solitary nature of the album’s creation—it was recorded with out his normal band, the 400 Unit—allowed Isbell’s wealthy storytelling to take middle stage. Foxes in the Snow, the Tennessee-based musician’s first solo album since 2015’s One thing Extra Than Free, is a companion of kinds to Southeastern, written and recorded in the aftermath of Isbell’s cut up from spouse and bandmate Amanda Shires.

Earnest and quietly distraught, Foxes in the Snow takes an much more stripped-down strategy than Southeastern, which, although largely guitar and piano-based, nonetheless featured some full-fledged Southern rock. The album options solely Isbell and one 85-year-old acoustic guitar, with no percussion or accoutrements of any kind, ensuing in his most starkly realized effort to date.

On “Gravelweed,” Isbell considers how earlier songs that he’s written about his relationship to Shires play in a different way now, which metastasizes right into a consideration of how one’s previous actions might not stand the take a look at of time. “Now I’ve lived to see my melodies betray me,” he laments, apologizing that “love songs all imply various things in the present day.” He entertains the thought of wishing he may get offended, and his lack of vitriol and pettiness is placing throughout most of the album.

Later, on the transcendent “True Believer,” Isbell caves to these impulses however just for a second, expressing frustration about how he’s abruptly seen as a villain by Shires’s associates, whom he as soon as favored. “All of your girlfriends mentioned I broke your fucking coronary heart, and I don’t prefer it,” he wails on the monitor’s refrain, virtually spitting the swear.

As is his wont, although, Isbell’s disposition is sort of uniformly honest and virtuous all through the remainder of Foxes in the Snow. He’s considered one of the finest craftsmen of uncool, old style, and irony-free country-rock, and the realizations that he’s come to as a sober and extra contemplative individual are humane in a approach that comes shut to anti-drama.

However Isbell’s eager pen and sharp performances normally discover a approach round it. The title monitor kicks off with the lyric: “I like my love/I like her mouth/I like the approach she turns the lights off in her home.” It looks like we could be in for a moderately bald-faced remembrance of his ex’s unusual traits and the weight they carried for him, however Isbell’s vocal tone is hedging the entire time, virtually mischievously. The little acoustic lick he pairs it with has a taunting, tricksy high quality to it. As he wades deeper into his musings, his attachments and affection turn into extra masochistic and bruised: “I like her chunk/I like the approach she disassembles me at evening,” he gleams, including, “I like the carrot however I actually love the stick.” He’s a glutton for punishment.

The one overly simplistic misstep right here is “Don’t Be Powerful,” on which Isbell performs a life coach rattling off solutions to, presumably, a toddler—issues like “Don’t be shitty to the waiter/He’s had a tougher day than you.” One retains ready for the monitor to take a flip, as Isbell’s finest songs sometimes do, with subsequent verses revealing new layers of intent. His 2023 track “Forged Iron Skillet” handled comparable material, solely it slyly doled out the counseling from the perspective of an unreliable narrator because it investigated a neighborhood of damaged individuals. “Don’t Be Powerful,” although, is frustratingly didactic, too tidy to really feel cathartic or transferring.

Fortunately, Foxes in the Snow doesn’t abound in cutesy truisms and isn’t afraid to confront Isbell’s doubts and despair head-on. Regardless of the chipper bluegrass riff of “Journey to Robert’s,” or the cresting, sky-reaching chord adjustments of songs like “Crimson & Clay,” it is a lonely, tortured album. It begins with an a cappella verse about the place Isbell desires to be buried and it ends with a deafeningly minor key observe. Like the grand however empty home that adorns the album’s cowl artwork, the comrades who as soon as lit up Isbell’s work, together with Shires, aren’t right here. It’s extremely affecting to witness him cope with what that absence means.