Gabe Lee – Drink The River

His 2022 release The Hometown Kid was worthy of many ‘end of year’ lists. It didn’t make mine because I felt I hadn’t listened to it sufficiently but I knew it contained a selection of great tunes and interesting lyrics. In the intervening year Lee has continued to build a growing reputation and this is his eagerly anticipated fourth release. It’s very good.

Here Lee throws his lot in with an acoustic sound that’s less country and more roots in arrangement and instrumentation. It’s unfussy and allows Lee to delve deep into some heartfelt and reflective lyrics. Drink The River declaims his on going search and failure for a ‘pot of gold’ by concluding that he ‘can’t drink the river to dry the land / Or bury the ocean beneath the sand / But I can love you’. Musically there is considerable craft in the varied and alluring melodies that make each song something to return to.

Complementing the words many songs are wistful. However, Even Jesus Got The Blues is brighter where fiddle, banjo and mandolin dance away. Jason Roller on various stringed instruments with Eamon McLaughlin on fiddle provide a great foundation and it’s McLaughlin’s wistful violin that provides this strong lachrymose thread to the sound. The subject of cancer is touched here and Lee talks of its devastation in Merigold. Elephant on Jason Isbell’s 2013 Southeastern talks of the illness and it’s impact: this seems a very similar song.  Throughout there are parallels with Isbell, who he’s opened for, in the voice, arrangements, emotion and sentiment.

Lightening the severity briefly Lee ends the album with a song John Prine might have written, Property Line. He sings of a couple of situations, where boundaries should be respected, including the error of chatting up a tall lesbian’s ex-girlfriend with subsequent violent consequences!

There’s something that exudes quality and class here and he’s building up to be important. However, you come away feeling that this album is more of a commiseration than a celebration; for me a little less shoe gazing and a quick sweep of the horizon would have made it five stars.