The crickets come in early on Quietly Blowing It, between the second and third songs. As the rustic, two-step rhythm of “The Great Mystifier” winds down, the guitars are replaced by the quiet burble of insects, a lonesome nighttime ambience interrupted by a lurch into the stumbling, country-funk dirge “Mighty Dollar.” It’s an odd bit of sequencing: a solitary sound bridging two songs that are the opposite of solitary. It’s also a familiar bit of sequencing: M.C. Taylor used a similar backdrop on Hiss Golden Messenger’s 2011 album Poor Moon and again on 2014’s Lateness of Dancers. Those were daring arrangements, especially the latter, which found the North Carolina countryside to be a lively collaborator. By contrast, the crickets on Quietly Blowing It sound more like shorthand, a nod to what worked before. This attempt to transport you to some stretch of woods or to a front porch at sunset instead only reminds you that this is an artist beginning to repeat himself.
It’s not just the crickets: Listening to Hiss Golden Messenger’s ninth proper album in 13 years (not counting live releases, joint albums, and a box set), it’s hard to shake the sense that you’ve heard all of this before. “Sanctuary,” for example, opens with a tentative acoustic strum before the rest of the band comes crashing in, but that trick worked better on previous albums, where it depicted an artist who’d come to a crossroads, agonized over his path, then set on his way with a new spring in his step. Here it just sounds like a thing that happens in a Hiss Golden Messenger song. The title track recalls “Devotion” from 2013’s Haw and so many other airy ballads he’s written in the past. Even the album cover looks like a mashup of Lateness of Dancers and Hallelujah Anyhow.
Except for two co-writes with Anaïs Mitchell and Gregory Alan Isakov, Taylor wrote most of the songs alone at his North Carolina home and recorded in his small office studio. He then recruited an impressive roster of headline guests, including Taylor Goldsmith from Dawes and legendary country guitarist/producer Buddy Miller. Together, they worked up some moments of exuberance and experimentation, like the rousing ending of “Way Back in the Way Back” and the Nebraska-style harmonica that haunts “Glory Strums (Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner).” On “Angels in the Headlights,” Taylor ties up a sun-bleached pedal steel, a drunken piano, and a nylon-string guitar with baling twine, creating something both strange and affecting. But that short song is a parenthetical aside on an album full of grandiose declarations about the world today. This is a statement album, broad and populist to a fault.