This could very well be the album of the year. As of March 2021, it's at least a strong contender. Pale Horse Rider, the new one from Wand-man Cory Hanson, out Friday on Drag City, is a rich blending of multiple genres, with a strain of Americana running through this. The kind of praise doled out on recent releases from The War on Drugs seems like the words that should be directed at this too, maybe more so.
"Paper Fog" and "Angeles" evoke moods world-weary and blissed out, while the title cut here is part Neil Young, part Jack Nitzsche. The track is languid, but carefully composed, as is most of what's here. If "Limited Hangout" and the woefully-titled "Vegas Knights" recall compositions by Joni Mitchell, of all things, the epic tracks near the close of Pale Horse Rider seal the deal in making this record such a mini-masterpiece. "Another Story from the Center of the Earth" takes the widescreen vistas of this album's sound and stretches them into something lonely and poetic, while "Pigs" is a beautiful, eerie composition that sounds a very tiny bit like Fleetwood Mac to me, at least in terms of how the melody progresses. Hanson is smart enough to hold back lots of times, but this talents are enormous, with each selection here being so perfectly pitched and arranged that the whole project feels like something from another era, when guys like Van Dyke Parks were still around.
Pale Horse Rider is out on Friday via Drag City.
[Photo: Asal Shaindoust]