Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit, Langhorne Slim
Jesse Sykes and Phil Wandscher, & Mimicking Birds

Style matters, for in those turbulent times these writers and their collaborators fused the vocal passion of African-American soul and gospel to an Anglo-Saxon storytelling tradition which goes back at least to Beowulf: Tough, hard, passionate, unflinching songs, unrepentant in their sense of place and direct in their stubborn Southernness. That is a powerful pile of names to spade across the work of Jason Isbell, as his second solo album, named for his band, is, well, only his second solo album. And he's almost 30. It's not simply that he lives in Florence, Alabama, just outside Muscle Shoals, nor that he recorded Jason Isbell And The 400 Unit at the famed FAME studio there. That guarantees nothing. The songs will stand on their own. The opening "Seven-Mile Island" manages simultaneously to evoke the long-ago sounds of Traffic (who have their own Muscle Shoals connection) and to serve as an oblique eulogy to the regionally famous harmonica player Topper Price, and yet it's about a failed father, a birthing mother, an island on which banished Native Americans congregated, a place where Jason and his dad used to go to collect arrowheads. All of those things said eloquently in just over four minutes, and there are layers unexamined by that long sentence.