RECOMMENDED RECORD: Dwight Yoakam: Brighter Days (Via Records/digital outlets)

From time to time Elsewhere will single out a recent release we recommend on vinyl, like this double album in a gatefold sleeve with lyrics and track credits and in a classy cover.

Check out Elsewhere's other Recommended Record picks . . .

.

In the rush to embrace new alt.country or young mainstream artists it's easy to overlook the career of someone like the great Dwight Yoakam who, for almost four decades, has been delivering his brand of rock-influenced country which has Petty and Springsteen fans in one corner and a rowdy honky-tonk crowd in another.

Yoakam has been consistent in his long career where the song is pre-eminent although this 14-song double album is his first of (mostly) new originals in almost a decade.

Yoakam has always picked interesting covers, on previous albums Prince's Purple Rain in a bluegrass style, John Fogerty's Who'll Stop the Rain and Queen's Crazy Little Thing Called Love alongside country classics.

This time out he picks up Chris Hillman's classic Byrds song Time Between, the traditional Keep On The Sunny Side banged up for the honky tonk drinkers and Cake's folksy Guthrie-like Bound Away with that great opening couplet given a twanged-up treatment: “I'm an unknown individual in an unattended car . . . away, away I'm bound away”.

Here too Yoakam gets alongside hipper-than-thou Post Malone for his original I Don't Know How To Say Goodbye (Bang Bang Boom Boom) . . . which to be honest doesn't much benefit from PM's appearance.

Yoakam carries this album on the back of his own sturdy vocals – which have that confident country yelp stopping always short of a yodel – as well as the exceptional guitar playing of Eugene Edwards and pedal steel players Drew Taubenfeld and Jamison Hollister.

Songs like the wire-tightened If Only barely leave enough room for oxygen (think a nervy Costello if Yoakam is unfamiliar to you) and the dancefloor directed Every Night – like 21^stcentury Buddy Holly – remind you that here's a guy who arrived in the post-punk period of country but still has heart in a place where they do the two-step.

Every Night

 

So there are terrific upbeat songs here, right from Wide Open Heart which kicks things off.

But Yoakam is also the master of a yearning heartbreak as on the ballad Hand Me Down Heart with Edwards baritone guitar twang and Taubenfeld's weeping pedal steel making it sound like a contemporary classic.

Elsewhere on this fine collection there are echoes of a tough-minded Jimmy Buffett (California Sky), classic Texas country-rock (Can't Be Wrong) and much more.

California Sky

 

Dwight Yoakam – annoyingly at 68 he can still fit into those tight jeans – never went away.

But he's certainly back with this album where the title track maybe takes on a special meaning of hope in these darker days.

.

This album is available on double vinyl from Southbound Records here. Also available on CD.