It might be premature to proclaim Allison Russell’s solo debut the album of the year — some of her collaborators and boosters have their records that may merit being in the running, of thousa…
’s solo debut the album of the year — some of her collaborators and boosters have their records that may merit being in the running, of thousands forthcoming — but “Outside Child” sure has the inside track. With 2021 not yet at the halfway point, it’s hard to imagine many other albums coming along that could match the combination of emotional potency, melodic fluency, social significance and heartrending beauty in Russell’s retelling of a lifetime’s worth of debasement and self-reclamation.
Prior to making this riveting solo bow, Russell was known to a very small segment of the musical cognoscenti as a member of the Canadian-based bands Birds of Chicago and Po’ Boy. She became more recognizable in the last two years as part of the Black, female, banjo-picking collective, a quartet that had Rhiannon Giddens as the marquee name to draw listeners in to a well-matched quartet of talents.
Russell is French-Canadian, but there’s enough adopted Southernness creeping into the Nashville-produced album that the Americana tag feels apt. Her “Nightflyer” sounds like something that could’ve been on a Shelby Lynne or Allison Moorer album, saluting the easy feel of Alabama instead of the metropolitan north. But she has bigger fish to fry than local municipalities, as the album frequently settles into the world of mythos.
Maybe the only time the sound of the album really gets as rugged as the subject matter is the starkly folky “All of the Women,” which has Russell taking a break from her own tale to relay the also real-life story of a sex worker she used to counsel in Vancouver. It probably shouldn’t be a surprise from the liner notes to learn that her childhood experiences made the singer enough of an empath that she became a mental-health worker for a number of years as an adult.
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