Consumer Guide Album

Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit: Weathervanes [Southeastern, 2023]
Through an educational early run with the Drive-By Truckers, foreshortened marriages to two musicians of serious substance, struggling for sobriety, going solo, and overseeing the 2020 multi-artist voting-rights album Georgia Blue, this guitar-toting 45-year-old son of two Alabama teenagers has established himself as an ambitious, gifted, temperamental, very Southern rock and roller of undeniable talent and rare political heart. So the consistent acuity of the 15 songs here is hardly a surprise, with my special favorites the high-strung gun-violence reenactment "Save the World" and the OD tragedy "When We Were Close." How compellingly Isbell the singer can deliver these well-put words of wisdom, however, has yet to fully reveal itself. A-