Lydia Loveless - Daughter LP

“Welcome to my bachelor pad,” Lydia Loveless sings at the outset of her new LP. “I stay here when things get bad.” Titled “Dead Writer,” the song was the first in a collection that would chronicle a major turning point in the roots-rocker’s life. Daughter, out today, is the first Loveless album since her divorce from her longtime bassist Ben Lamb, the first since her departure from her longtime home base of Columbus, the first since her messy falling out with longtime label Bloodshot Records. If these past four years have been a time of global upheaval, her personal and professional life has mirrored that tumult.

So it’s perhaps unsurprising that Daughter is a Lydia Loveless album unlike any other. Her sardonic wit and powerfully twangy croon are instantly recognizable, and her songs remain as purposeful and direct as ever. But these 10 tracks find her expanding on the sonic exploration of 2016’s tremendous Real, shading new styles and nuances into a straightforward template. Recording at the Loft in Chicago with Wilco accomplice Tom Schick, Loveless and her band teased their sound out in various directions, often morphing the songs beyond their barebones barroom rock origins in ways that recall everyone from the Replacements to Kate Bush. It’s almost like if Waxahatchee made an album in the mold of Wilco’s deeply moody and subtly adventurous Ode To Joy; you can hear the fog Loveless was under when she wrote these songs, as well as the inspiration that seemed to strike again and again. -Stereogum