Consumer Guide Album

Hayes Carll: You Get It All [Dualtone, 2021]
The opener is the jauntiest climate-change song you ever heard, only then two tracks later comes one so depressive you think about shutting the whole album down, only upon reflection you realize that in between there's a marriage song that melds both modes and also that the depressive one nails that mindstate without lionizing or minimizing it. In toto, a perfect triptych, though thereafter the album is merely mortal even if the bitter Brandy Clark duet "In the Mean Time," the sweet-and-sour "The Way I Love You," and a sanely fatalistic double finale I was relieved to see bore an Allison Moorer credit are quite all right. A-