In both content and style, Brandy Clark’s self-titled new album serves as a homecoming following three bold, loosely conceptual releases that situated her in a lane distinct from the parochial strictures of country radio. Not only does the album find her singing openly about her background, including her family (“She Smoked in the House”) and home state of Washington (“Northwest”), it also hews closer to country conventions than her prior releases.
While a self-titled album is often intended as a defining creative statement, a summation of an artist’s legacy or style, Brandy Clark is more uncharacteristic. Instead of foregrounding Clark’s knack for wordplay and humor, the album announces the singer as a virtuosa, engaging with country music’s well-worn tropes with both skill and refinement.
The album’s opener, “Ain’t Enough Rocks,” is somewhat of a red herring, as its foreboding rock sound and lyrics about two sisters who kill their abusive father signal a return to the grittiness of early songs like “Stripes” and “Girl Next Door.” Clark, however, follows that murder ballad with a breakup song, “Buried,” whose initially prideful lyrics contrast sharply with its somber acoustic sonics. When she sings, “I’ll Love you ’til I’m buried,” she continues to draw attention to mortality, a through line that grounds the album in a sense of plaintive solemnity.
Much of the rest of the album follows suit with world-weary songs about love of various kinds. The Brandi Carlile-assisted “Dear Insecurity” is a second-person denouncement of self-doubt, while “Come Back to Me” is an equally earnest country-pop ballad that highlights Clark’s lyrical acuity: “I wanna hold you, but I don’t wanna hold you back.” Elsewhere, “She Smoked in the House,” an ode to her grandmother, is rich in vivid details like moldy cantaloupe and lipstick rings around cigarettes.
Brandy Clark mostly pulls back on the spirited provocativeness of Clark’s earlier work, with lyrics about loss accented by a musical motif of heartfelt strings, but its standout tracks deploy the traditional themes and sounds of country in inventive ways. On “All Over Again,” cymbals punctuate Clark’s layered harmonies and lyrics about tortured love, and “Best Ones” introduces harmonica to reroute the album’s sound more toward homespun country rock than adult contemporary. These songs inject Brandy Clark with a welcome vigor and exhibit Clark’s willingness to at once embrace her playful artistic spirit and the comfort of country conventions.
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