Consumer Guide Album

Iris DeMent: Workin' on a World [Flariella, 2023]
Too often on her first album since 2012 DeMent bonds with progressive rhetoric as uncritically as she memorized Bible verses when she was eight. In "Goin' Down to Sing in Texas," language like "the establishment," "people of color," "obscene amounts of wealth," and swear to God "those brave women in the Squad" can seem banal, even corny. But as she keeps going her ex-fundamentalist commitment to human equality is so out front its sincerity becomes a wonderment, until it's a lock cinch that the lead track's "Workin' on a world I may never see" bespeaks a courage, idealism, and self-sacrifice you're damn right she's preaching about. The one that begins "John Lewis stood on the Pettus Bridge" goes on to honor Rachel Corrie, crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer in Gaza; DeMent's husband Greg Brown crafts a just barely satirical rabble-rouser for a racist evangelist called "Let Me Be Your Jesus" that she whispers into music; Martin Luther King, Mahalia Jackson, and Anton Chekhov all get their own songs. A horn section you weren't expecting helps punch her message home, and although her voice has deepened a tad as she passes 60, its clarity and directness remain. A-