Wyatt At The Coyote Palace

Arriving on the heels of her 2015 road memoir Don’t Suck, Don’t Die: Giving Up Vic Chesnutt, which focused on Kristin Hersh's long friendship with the late singer/songwriter, Wyatt at the Coyote Palace delivers another audio-visual experience via a 24-track LP and an accompanying hardback book stocked with lyrics, notes, essays, and photographs. Published through her own co-founded nonprofit organization CASH Music, the double album is a purely Hersh-oriented affair, with the alt-rock hero handling all of the parts. Having that kind of freedom can be a creative death knell for some artists, but Hersh has always operated in another realm, both sonically and lyrically, and she takes to the open-ended format with gusto. Opener "Bright" starts off on familiar ground, with Hersh fingerpicking one of her signature spectral melodies. However, things begin to shift gears quickly, with wild swaths of dissonance rolling in like downed wires. Hersh's voice remains electric, if not a bit rawer than usual, and her knack for pairing big, circular pop hooks with dreamlike lyrics and rhythmic left turns remains intact. When all of those pistons start to pump, as is the case on standout cuts "Hemingway's Tell," "Diving Bell," and "Between Piety and Desire," the results can be hair-raising, but at just over 80 minutes of material, there's a lot to digest here. It's easy to stand on the sidelines and say that a more streamlined, ten- to 12-track version of the album would suffice, but one of the many things that's helped to make Hersh such a singular talent over the years is her unwillingness to compromise, and on that front, the punishing and beautiful Wyatt at the Coyote Palace doesn't disappoint. ~ James Christopher Monger