It’s a wonderful springtime for rebirths, and this debut album from Tyler Dozier, a golden blend of sleepy, honeyed country and slackerish indie rock, celebrates two. First, the southern singer-songwriter’s outgrowing of a strict religious upbringing in Alabama, and second, her emancipation from a controlling relationship. Christ and creeps are dismissed in intertwining ways on the melancholy, heavy-strummed No Home: “I got a new skin/ I’m no longer a slave to all of your patriarchal sins.”
In the main, though, Dozier steps lightly through her complicated evolution: her wry delivery has something of the Liz Phair about it in the likes of Paradox, with its woozily, shoegaze-tinged pedal steel, and the shuffly, sardonic Misandrist to Most, while the gorgeously regretful Plagiarist’s Blues sinks its melodic hooks deep with a classic country couplet: “I don’t wanna write my own songs, I wanna sing everybody else’s/ Yet there’s no one who feels quite the way I do”. There are hints of more exotic influences, too, in the sunlit bossa nova rhythm of Better Off Alone, with its flourishes of loungey sax, and Drink Your Sorrows, a handclap-laced trip into darker corners that adds interesting shadows to I Am the Prophet’s beautiful blasphemy.
