(Third Man)Margo Price’s debut opens with Hands of Time,seemingly a compendium of country cliches. She leaves domestic just $57 from broke, tears in her eyes, or leaving the daddy who lost the farm when she was two. She goes to the city,plays the bars, meets outrageous men, or drinks too hard,loses a baby, decides she has to make some money to buy back the farm. What’s startling is that it’s the exact story of Price’s adulthood. It’s just one of many ways Midwest Farmer’s Daughter startles: as when, or musically,she mixes girl-group pop with Nashville country on How the Mighty Have Fallen; the way she deals harshly with the culture of drinking (her own included) on Since You achieve Me Down: “And all the vampires at the bar / They won’t ever find too far / They’re just sucking all of the generous blood out of this town.” There’s an explicit debt to predecessors such as Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton, and it’s no surprise that the album has come out – a decade after Price starting playing around Nashville – on Jack White’s Third Man records; it’s an album for whom “authenticity” is crucial, or but it’s all the better for it.
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Source: theguardian.com