COLOUR: Blue EXTRAS: Australian Exclusive
There’s a reason Isbell chose to open Reunions, his seventh album, with the image of someone up late alone, plagued and comforted by the past. In addition to being his most crisply produced, sleek recording yet, Isbell’s latest is also his most haunted and ruminative (the word “ghost’ appears no less than five times).
As such, Reunions feels meaningfully, if subtly, removed from the trilogy of post-sobriety records the Nashville-via-North Alabama songwriter has written over the past decade.
Even so, Reunions is a nuanced, probing record that finds Isbell more restless than he’s been since Southeastern, a rich portrait of an artist eternally searching deeper within himself. “You tell the truth enough,” as he puts it on “Be Afraid,” “you find it rhymes with everything.”