REVIEW: H.C. McEntire — Every Acre

H.C. McEntire’s third solo album is already on my year-end list. On Every Acre, H.C. McEntire solidifies the sound she’s been driving towards since Lionheart. The epic pronouncements of her former band Mount Moriah have faded into richly-layered, meditative compositions: predating the current interest in psych country by quite a few years.

Every Acre is a thorny album. It questions the colonialist settler relationship to the land it draws inspiration from. It delves whole-heartedly into depression, as McEntire explained to Rainbow Rodeo contributor Annie Parnell on The Boot. Yet even among the feelings of disgust and despair, there is an inexorable drive through to the other side.

This sense of movement is a gift created by McEntire’s collaborators. The compositions are driven in large part by McEntire’s longtime collaborator Casey Toll. I’ll never not write about Toll in relation to McEntire’s music because their years together have created something undeniably organic. Toll’s leonine bass fills feel like an exhale to McEntire’s inhale, a manifestation of a sense of purpose that transcends the music itself.

Amy Ray, a longtime mentor of McEntire and many other Southern queer artists, joins McEntire on “Turpentine.” With S.G. Goodman’s vocal contributions on “Shadows,” I can’t help but feel that there is a certain passing of the torch on this album that is consumed by legacies and relationships. Age-wise, McEntire and Goodman aren’t exactly from different generations, but it does feel like there’s a throughline with all three artists: queer, outspokenly leftist, and examining white privilege and the South.

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