GRAHAM, WAYNE - Joy ! (LP+mp3) (Sealed) (LP)

Joy" ties up right there. The two write fantastic songs, sometimes literally overnight, which others would have to work on for months. They are virtuoso musicians and clever producers of themselves, but they always remain objective, almost sober. A doctrine that probably goes back to her heroes - people like J.J. Cale or the recently deceased Don Williams quoted on the album, but above all John Prine, who - just like singer Kenny Miles - was on the road as a postman in rural Kentucky before his music career. On the other hand, this polite discreetness is certainly also due to her upbringing. They grew up in a family as religious as they were believers. Her father once founded a church in her hometown where the two brothers - then just eight and 13 years old - regularly accompany him at church services on drums and bass. Nevertheless, the new album expands its colour palette by a good piece. The opener ,On My Throne" rolls surprisingly bluesy and bitterly political from loudspeakers ("I'm better off than I deserve | I'm full of war but I never had to serve") and also the driving, lyrically so beautifully puzzling ,White Rose" you never saw coming. Toyman" is the first instrumental piece that divides the album into two halves. Besides, "Joy!" is like a transcontinental band album. The only musicians besides the two brothers are multi-instrumentalist Ludwig Bauer and guitarist Johannes Till, who formed their backing band at the Orange Blossom Festival and recorded some of the new songs in Dresden. Joy", explains Kenny Miles, "is also the brothers' first album, which was produced while living in different places (Whitesburg, KY and Nashville, TN) and still their most collaborative. Never before would they have spun on each other's ideas more strongly in songwriting. Above all, Hayden Miles, actually drummer in the band, contributes two songs of his own, which leave the alternative country terrain completely. Fragile, quiet indie-pop songs like a tentative exploration of undreamt-of possibilities. Don Williams" describes his rummage in blank tapes from the estate of her early deceased".papaws" Wayne (by the way, the band name is made up of the first names of both grandfathers). You could hear sermons, the voices of friends and relatives and on about every third cassette: the eponymous country songwriter. Here" is like a walk through a post-apocalyptic-looking American small town where you can't find any traces of the money that was earned there not so long ago from coal mining. Civilization junk lying around in the front gardens, emptiness and rural exodus. "At the foot of a small town's mountain |resting high above their eager eyes | black from the money that they've earned here | seeing no return while they get high" If you ask singer Kenny about her approach to the new album you get an answer that is not dissimilar to the songs on it - understatement but never without poetry.