LORI MCKENNA > Unglamorous

From the DIY simplicity of Paper Wings & Halo through the starkly muscular Bittertown, Lori McKenna sketches people nobody sees, emotions most don’t acknowledge and small moments missed with hollow-point stopping power. Go in like any bullet, the songs widen out on contact-ripping a hole many times their actual size upon reflection.

Label: STYLSONIC/WARNER BROS.
[Rating: 4]

From the DIY simplicity of Paper Wings & Halo through the starkly muscular Bittertown, Lori McKenna sketches people nobody sees, emotions most don’t acknowledge and small moments missed with hollow-point stopping power. Go in like any bullet, the songs widen out on contact-ripping a hole many times their actual size upon reflection.

How the songs are recorded isn’t nearly as important as the emotional octane in her voice and the way she drips details like candle wax, searing what she sees into your flesh. That voice-a silvery wisp, then a deeply guttural thrust-carries power and nuance with equal ease, and it’s one of her best weapons. Consequently, Unglamorous, McKenna’s “major label” debut, starts at the voice and works from there. Whether it’s the thrilling taunt of a love that can’t be abandoned no matter the circumstances on the driving “I Know You,” replete the details and inner knowledge of a love shared over years, the wavering resolve of “How To Survive,” that chronicles the white knuckle survival strategies that are anything but the joy of thriving or the aching looking back at the tiny 6-year old’s moments with a mother in the throes of critical illness “Leaving This Life,” McKenna hits the emotional bulls-eye song after song.

If the title track’s a bit too convenient, playing to the we’re-not-the-jet-set commonality of working class suburbs, the harrowing “Falter” embraces a kid who doesn’t fit in, who no one ever reaches out to, from the insight and grace of a “Maybe I should have…” grown-up perspective. It’s the same tentative, but knowing realization that makes the co-dependent’s “Drinkin’ Problem” strike such a chord: the one who isn’t drinking pays just as steep a tariff and swallows several times the pain.

Clear-eyed compassion is Lori McKenna’s trade. Lushness aside, Unglamorous offers it in a more mass-market setting for-potentially-a larger audience in desperate need.