Hank Williams had a gift for writing jaunty, hummable tunes wedded to some of the most broken-hearted lyrics imaginable. Songs like "Nobody's Lonesome For Me", "Your Cheatin' Heart", and "Why Don't You Love Me" communicated pain and longing over blithely up-tempo melodies, putting a brave face on his restless blues.
Austin-based indie pop combo Brothers and Sisters may be only part-time practitioners of country, but they're nonetheless adept at tying pretty bows around heartache and regret. The band's newest album, Fortunately, is grounded in the kind of clean, 1960s-influenced pop-rock and insurgent twang that, in most other hands, would be hard-pressed to transcend mere revivalist fare. In the care of siblings Will and Lily Courtney and their band, however, these shopworn building blocks are lent renewed vitality thanks to lyrics colored by experience and wisdom.
In this light, those sun-kissed harmonies and Byrdsian chord changes emerge as desperately held lifelines to innocence, rather than facile signposts of good vibes and easy loving. R.E.M.'s Out of Time feels like a crucial reference point here-- in particular the record's two opening cuts, "Mason City" and "You're Gone", manage Stipe and co.'s trick of suffusing harmonically genial college-pop with heartsick verbiage. "The Air Is Getting Thicker" reflects wistfully upon days when "things were so easy" and "time seemed to move so slow," amidst the band's most unabashed approximation of Roger McGuinn's songbook. "Can't Hold Me Back" finds the Courtneys betraying their sprightly melodies by carefully musing, "all the things I love about you outweigh the things I do not."
Brothers and Sisters do fine with strummy Rickenbacker pop, but Fortunately reveals the group to be more affecting when it ladles on the pedal steel. The very hint of that lonesome whine adds instant resonance to "I Don't Rely" and "California"-- the latter subtly echoing "Lay Lady Lay"-- and it gets even better when the band immerses itself in a refreshing kind of alt-country that eschews poetic antiquaries in favor of wry candor. "Lonely Man" drily asks the listener to "drink a barrel of Kentucky whiskey/ and spend an hour on a tilt-a-whirl" to understand the way he feels inside, an equation of love with physical burden likewise found in the titular refrain of the record's best song, "Make a Man's Body Hurt". Will Courtney, aware as always of the emotional realities of time's passage, narrates the tumultuous evolution of a love that begins with the bittersweet marvel, "I'd been searching for this feeling so long/ I thought it died with my youth."
Everything about Fortunately is deceptive; a half-hearted listen might lead you to believe the Courtneys and their mates were unvariegated paint-by-numbers throwbacks, yet the album finds room for a deliberately cheeky novelty number about the Texas heat as well as a seven-plus-minute dream-pop closer. Any old sadcore band can set you staring at your shoelaces, but getting listeners to contemplate mortality while happily humming and tapping their toes is something subversively special.
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