Justin Townes Earle
Album: Single Mothers/Absent Fathers
Label: Loose
Tracks: 10/10
Website: http://www.justintownesearle.com

If it slipped past your radar when released towards the end of 2014, there's a second chance to discover Single Mothers with its reissue/repromotion to coincide with the arrival of its companion piece. Recorded during the same sessions, both of them sharing themes of physical and emotional distance, their individual titles are brought together on the first album's bluesily soulful eponymous track with its pointed reference to father Steve, who left home when his son was still young.

Scarred with autobiographical wounds, that album weaves a soulful path (often embossed with brass arrangements as well as keening pedal steel) through fear of commitment (Wanna Be A Stranger), the ghosts of broken relationships (Picture In A Drawer), the inevitability of disappointment (Time Shows Fools) and, conjuring thoughts of Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham, the lost love yearning melancholy of White Gardenias. While much of this is the stuff of which barroom wallows are made, Earle isn't one to chain himself to a musical rut, and, backed by musicians from Lambchop, Calexico and CentroMatic, he also kicks up the tempo and mood on things like the funky swaggering My Baby Drives, the steel-laced mid tempo shuffling Today And A Lonely Night and the rousing rocking closer, Burning Pictures where he playfully turns the mirror of heartbreak back on himself (he is, after all, now happily wed) to ask "are you still starting fires and burning pictures?"

It'll be of little surprise to find absence doesn't make the heart grow fonder, opening with the pointed, punningly titled Farther From Me and the line "wish that I could say that I know you" as he sings about "the ghosts of a child's hopes." Another soul influenced number, it's interesting to hear how Earle's voice, and at times his phrasing, occasionally echoes not so much his dad but Jonathan Richman (especially on Why's account of an imploding relationship), though, having said that, the slow bluesy When The One You Love Loses Faith blends Otis Redding and Willie Nelson and the boredom-infused Slow Monday's, with its Hawaiian steel guitar, has a hint of Hank in there.

As with its predecessor, there's a place for chugging bluesy boogie and throaty guitar with Round The Bend and Someone Will Pay as well as a song in which Earle plays the heartbreaker rather than the heartbroken as, to a country soul groove he faces his shame and guilt and tells his lover to Call Ya Momma and "tell her I ain't doin' you right."

However, Earle has said the second record suggests a very distant light at the end of the tunnel and, after numerous stints in rehab, a sense of recovery informs the pedal steel streaked Day And Night where darkness gives way to light in the form of the woman with whom he now shares his life and who's "gonna help carry me" while, with just an acoustic guitar, the album closes with future classic Looking For A Place To Land and, again acknowledging the salvation he has found in his wife, the poignant line "you held me up 'til I could stand, now I never fly alone, I've got a place to land." Son arise.

Mike Davies