Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit - "Weathervanes"
Track 5 WRECKED me
Jason Isbell is an artist who gets a lot of praise in Alt Country circles. Many fans in those conversations will caveat, though:
WITH the 400 Unit.
As Alt Country artists have recently been easing me back into the genre that I loved so dearly in my childhood, I couldn’t help but take notice of this name that kept popping back up.
I hadn’t yet had the chance to go back and dig through Isbell’s old discography, with or without the 400 Unit, when this album popped up on lists of upcoming releases. So here it is.
And I’m not disappointed.
Isbell’s writing and storytelling chops in his songs are incredible. His voice doesn’t satisfy immediately, but the light tenor grows on you, and he pours himself into each song with skill and passion. Whether the song is about losing everything to disability (“King of Oklahoma”) or the death of a friend and partner (“When We Were Close”) or navigating the tragedies of small, conservative towns (“Cast Iron Skillet”), Isbell’s voice brings emotion and precision to his already strong lyrics. And most of this album would be perfectly at-home in an anthology of Southern Gothic songs and poetry.
The other half of this equation, the 400 Unit,1 is a five-piece band which formed around Isbell in the late 00s. They first appeared with Isbell on Isbell’s second album in 2009.
The instrumentation is complex and layered throughout the album. On every song. And there are moments of such technical prowess and mind-blowing composition that the band is clearly just as skilled and competent as the most artful and technical Prog Metal and Math Rock acts.2
On no track is this more apparent than “Save the World”, which also features some of Isbell’s most pointed lyrics. This song stands head-and-shoulders above the rest of the already-incredible album.
Go ahead and give that a listen. The tension in that guitar chills the blood. It’s concentrated anxiety, and it’s absolutely perfect.
As a parent, I had to take off my headphones and take a good five minute break to recover after hearing this one the first time.
Granted, with the disparity between this track and the rest, it’s hard to call the whole album perfect. Especially with the thematic elements being so loose that I have yet to really grasp them. But this one is really good. Likely going to be the top Country album of the year, hands-down.
Rating: Blue
The 400 Unit is named after the psychiatric ward at Eliza Coffee Memorial Hospital, located in Florence, Alabama. The ward was in a separate building, so it became colloquially known as “the 400 Unit”.
I swear, if anybody mentions Jordan Rudess unironically, I’ll ban them. (No offense to Jordan Rudess; there are more ways to showcase technical ability than just MOAR NOTES)