Chris Stapleton - "Higher"
The title is relative
Chris Stapleton is one of my favorite Country acts. Part of this is because he comes at the genre from the same direction as another of my all-time favorites: Travis Tritt. Stapleton started out in a Tritt cover band, so all of his original material also incorporates a lot of that Blues and Blues-Rock flavor, occasionally going so far as to sound like Jazz or Soul.
Best of all, he doesn’t bring the same MAGA-loving political baggage that Tritt does nowadays.
Stapleton also has a great, distinctive voice with an incredible range. Don’t let the beard fool you — he’s an incredible vocalist, not just some Duck Dynasty guy. He’s immensely talented, and one of the best acts that the genre has seen in a long time.
Which is why Higher, his fifth studio album, is honestly a little disappointing.
There are still some really solid songs here: “The Fire” maintains a harmonic two-guitar groove which provides an incredible support for the solid vocal melody all the way through; “White Horse” starts with this pseudo-prog intro and then explodes into a Blues-Rockabilly anthem; title track “Higher” is a slow, soulful love song which rings with drawling passion; “The Day I Die” is a callback to classic Country heartbreak songs with a bridge full of accidentals and a strong, sad melody.
The whole album is filled with layers of strings — mostly guitars (of all kinds), but also a bit of violin — and most other instrumentation takes a back seat (even percussion). Most songs end up sounding somewhat complex, as a result, with the varying lines overlapping and passing by one-another in the fashion of organized chaos. Some, like “The Fire”, pull this back and opt for a more structured, minimalistic approach. Ultimately, there’s a lot of variety on the album, but it’s all still unified under Stapleton; even when they sound very much like typical Country music, Stapleton and his band have this unique quality — it’s still clearly a Stapleton song, and there’s no mistaking it for anything else even when he isn’t singing.
With all of that said, many of the songs also feel uninspired. He’s playing on a lot of standard tropes here. He does them well, of course, but there isn’t much that really elevates or unifies the album beyond his stylistic signatures and, of course, his voice.
Another Country song about being a truck driver? Cool. Five1 more songs about having a broken heart? Great. Finally dropping your token “Male Country Artist Who Needs a Woman in Order to Feel Like a Man” song?2 Lovely.
I love Stapleton because he is such a great blend of traditional Country sounds with Modern awareness. He doesn’t pander much, if at all. He just writes good fucking music. But he’s leaning into tropes on Higher, and, despite the title, tropes don’t elevate things in most cases.
This album is still good. Fans of the genre have some serious treats here, and there are certainly still a few songs that can be used to showcase that Country music should be taken seriously. But I was expecting a bit more.
Rating: Green
I haven’t counted, I’m just saying there are a lot of them.
Track 4: “It Takes a Woman”; granted, I cannot recall right this moment whether this is his first song in this vein for certain.