Colter Wall never had a problem sounding wise beyond his years, but his sixth LP might be where his soul has finally caught up with his voice. From its opening, “1800 Miles,” he’s already gloatingly demarcating his distance from the mainstream cosplayers of the craft he’s been shy to take credit for continuing; now, he’s puffing his chest and bellowing taunts from the top of a mountain deep in the hills of cow country. “You ain’t cool if you ain’t counter culture weird,” he huffs, backed by a band confident in its own kitchiness, just a half step north of barroom bleaters that 2023’s Little Songswas learning from and sometimes leaning on.
There’s a fullness here, a more well-read product contrasted with the sweeps of green and grey his hometown of Saskatchewan, Canada, is draped in; it stands in stark contrast to Wall’s previous employment of big, brooding motifs that swallowed prior projects. There once was, and maybe still can be, moments that sow this soil just as much as its farmers and livestock did.
On Memories and Empties, those sequences are beginning to feel more autobiographical than his previous creaky murder ballads or tales of the torturous Toronto taxman. Much like his 2023 LP, these songs are becoming more present-tense while still pastorally minded, but the vibrancy is turned up a notch. Here, his voice isn’t bouncing off canyons like it would on previous records. They’re waltzed to with a long-held lover on “My Present Just Gets Past Me,” or used as expository and ebullient dialogue sharp enough to pierce a blizzard through “Like The Hills.”
Even if contextually or conjecturally, Wall seems to be framing some of these stories through the active voice rather than poring over parchment and leather as he would have in a writing session five years ago. It’s almost as if the 30-year-old is aging in reverse when he mutters lines like “If we make it through these days, as the old timers say, like the hills, we’ll still be right here.” The tunes have always been time-frozen, but the cowboy’s latest feels comfortable addressing the amalgamation of eras he’s created with an increase in ownership, now forgoing more foggy tribute songs.
A lot of that is the natural progression of Little Songs, a record that paired Wall and bandmate Patrick Lyons in the studio to clack together core ideas from previous Western standards. Which, in its own way, continued on the tribute-laden pantomiming of 2020’s Western Swing & Waltzes and Other Punchy Songs. If the latter drew out a rough sketch of this internal guidemap, and the former helped fill it with primary colors, then here is where the canvas finally gets its character-defining shades and hues.
So it’s unsurprising, and a little comforting, that the marriage between band and bovine wrangler here feels as seamless as it ever has in a shared studio. Knowing that chemistry is nearing completion, the eagerness this collective brings, even in its hokiest moments, feels like it’s strutting through ghost towns, holding their heads high above the brim of their hats.
It’s sharp as pianos bounce and guitars prance on “It’s Getting So (That a Man Can’t Go into Town Just to Have Him a Drink),” a gleefully complacent number that has the feel of a backend single-play in some dusty jukebox. Even in spaces previously deemed dim and dour, the singer is comfortable in celebrating his seat at the ash-coated table.
As his technicalities have become more populated, so have his stories, with “Memories and Empties” far less of a siloed submersion into blistering winters or the weeps of windy hayfields that Wall has acted as a sole occupant of in his catalog. The subject matter has changed little, but his attitude toward isolation has certainly stagnated. On “Summer Wages,” a band of saloon bandits clinks bottles and joins in on the harmony, all of whom are in tune with Wall’s state of cyclical romance.
On his cover of Ian Tyson’s Summer Wages”, he’ll even get a little meta, toying with the nostalgia of it all when he takes the time to jolt out of a stiff and creaky twilight. Or on “4/4 Time,” where there’s a whimsy so stylized it’s on par with an early Disney protagonist making small talk by whistling with the birds. Wall is becoming pretty nifty and finding new muses in moments free of historical citation, even if flecks of his forefathers are wedged between his bootsoles.
The Canadian has always passed the sniff test. A gruff, grimy, cigarette-stained timbre, paired with splotches and soundbites stripped straight off a Merle Haggard or Lefty Frizzell record and placed on a relatively blank backdrop, has earned Wall an upper-echelon spot where by-the-book contemporaries elbow their way to the front of the lookalike contest. Now a decade into his proper career, that initial form stretching a subculture in itself, and he’s never seemed less bothered.
The highs of this newest effort are in its warm steels, its sweeping slides, moments that feel occupied inside the eternal terrain Wall loves to swing his paintbrush through. When he bellows a soft line like “How could I try now to sing a song, when the good Lord’s smallest creature can croon it out so strong,” earned introspection takes hold even when trapped in that blue-vaulted terrain. Reflection requires awareness, but being present takes total surrender to really master. Like any true old-timer, Wall’s soul seems to beam, even when his guard is down.
