Following the release of 2013’s Haw and the recent reissue of the debut album Bad Debt, Hiss Golden Messenger is (are?) back with a fifth studio album and the first for Merge Records.
There is some doubt as to whether it is correct to refer to HGM as singular or plural entity. The record label refer to a "country-rock ensemble" while Wikipedia says they are a duo comprising singer songwriter M.C. Taylor and multi-instrumentalist Scott Hirsch. Meanwhile, Spotify's biography straddles both schools of thought by calling HGM "a vehicle for Michael (MC) Taylor".
Videos may show Taylor as a lone man strumming and emoting yet while the songs and vision are unquestionably his own, the sound on this album is that of a tight-knit band.
It was not always thus. An instructive compare and contrast exercise can be made between this and his (their?) debut release since a track entitled Drum appears on both albums.
Originally, this featured just Taylor on acoustic guitar but for the new version there's a lively fiddle and backing chorus to keep him company. Unsurprisingly, the song has a more joyous quality as a result.
Lateness of Dancers was recorded in a tin-roofed barn outside of Hillsborough, North Carolina, and, with the help of a group longtime collaborators, including Scott Hirsch, it is both a personal and inclusive collection.
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Now a father twice over, it is as if Taylor has realised he is no longer journeying through this mean old world on his lonesome. Haw was already heading towards a more expansive sound and Lateness of Dancers takes us further on down the same road.
On Mahogany Dread, for instance, he reflects that "it's getting hard to be easy now" but this thought comes with the optimism that "happy days are still ahead".
On a video trailer for the album Taylor says he had a vision of a person kneeling alone under the sky. The man is not praying, maybe he is just picking up his hat, but there's a sense that this moment is important. This combination of the rapturous and the workaday is what inspired these new songs.
Gravelly-voiced singer songwriters are ten-a-penny nowadays but there is a truth and authenticity to Taylor's voice that makes him and his band of cohorts worth hearing.
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