Consumer Guide Album

Brandy Clark: Brandy Clark [Warner, 2023]
The best country songwriters have tended female in this century, and Clark is pretty much the sharpest, as indicated by her chief rival Miranda Lambert glomming onto Clark's "Mama's Broken Heart" as her smash-hit own. Now 47, a forthright lesbian who's all over Ashley McBryde's small-town musical-beds burlesque Lindeville, Clark writes so much ace material that not one of her four albums lags. In the lead track here, two young sisters murder their abusive father and it feels so uplifting you're proud nobody's the wiser. You know how much she loved her grandma when she calls one "She Smoked in the House" and how much she loves an unnamed other by bragging about how often she comes up in therapy. A-