OREN, PETER - The Greener Pasture (Sealed) (LP)

Peter Oren's new album The Greener Pasture offers a bleak answer to the question "where will I go/ if I don't want to be/ with idle hands awaiting catastrophe/ here in the Anthropocene" posed on his title track of his previous album Anthropocene: "The greener pasture is also fenced in/ the wider trough has an asterisk/ rotate the herd every few days/ or is it every few years/ we got their tags on our ears/ standing in shit crying bovine tears." Indiana-born, everywhere-based singer-songwriter Peter Oren possesses a remarkable singing voice, low and deep and richly textured: as solid as a glacier, as big as a mountain. Similar in its baritone gravel to Bill Callahan, a hero of his, it rumbles in your conscience, a righteous sound that marks him as an artist for our tumultuous times, when sanity seems absent from popular discussions.