Credit Electric

The past couple of years have seen quite a few comic country albums, American explorations, and retreads of the connective tissue in between. There are elements of those genres at play within the new album by the Bay Area’s Credit Electric, but the band chooses not to plunge wholesale into that particular ether, instead creating an album that’s more concerned with texture and atmosphere within the context of their own particular alt-country air. Honestly, to even tie it that far to a genre is disingenuous. The band employs pedal steel and synth in equal footing, unfurling songs of solace that squint in the early evening sun all the same.

With themes of emotional baggage, hypocrisy, co-dependency, losing oneself and the inevitability of demise, the album doesn’t always sound so comforting on paper, but songwriter Ryan LoPilato wraps his themes in a gauze cocoon that rocks the listener gently even as the wounds weep through the wrappings. With producer David Glasebrook the band crafts American hymns that peer through fogged glass, tracing the lines of lament in hazy relief over the course of out of love in the face of a shadow. The slow bleed of genre, the bare emotional aura, and the pillowy comforts of the album come together into a record that’s comforting while revealing its complexities each time the listener dives back for another trip around its orbit.

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