Face the Feeling, by Jobi Riccio
Although Jobi Riccio lives in Nashville, the singer and songwriter’s creativity resides well away from the alternately lauded and loathed Music Row. Her 2023 debut album, Whiplash, put down roots in the neighborhood of alt-country and Americana; on her follow-up, Face the Feeling, she travels more widely.
Riccio travels with some familiar people: her two co-producers, Isaiah Beard and Jesse Timm, were also co-producers on Whiplash, and their contributions as players continue to buttress her songs.
As proven by one particular track, “High Beam,” most of Riccio’s songs could stand on nothing more than her guitar and her voice. Especially her voice, which glides from coffee-house whisper to pop-operatic high note with an ease that—perhaps like a little, shyer sister to Brandi Carlile—she humbly reveals rather than grandly showboats.
Riccio uses voice and lyrics as if they are the handles of a divining rod for close emotion. Within the classical-folk construction of “Coyote,” with strings and plucked piano bells, she unearths and buries the break of a childhood friendship, while in the fuzz-rock mournfulness of “Love of the Song” she examines creative depression until she thinks she finds a way out of it.
Other lanes of musical travel include “Buzzkill,” with ultra-compressed modern-rock dynamics that suggest what Martinis & Bikinis-era Sam Phillips would’ve been like had she been in her 20s instead of her 30s; “A Little at a Time” suffuses folk-rock thoughtfulness with Madi Diaz’s kind of intimacy; and “The Ridge” uncurls grungy riffs into a smoldering climax of complicated romanticism.
With “Wildfire Season,” her earnestness turns didactic—“The richest in the history of man/Keep talkin’ ‘bout space like it’s the promised land”—but her voice finds the necessary righteousness. And if Whiplash built an artistic place for her to stay, Face the Feeling shows she can roam and then bring it all back home.
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Get Face the Feeling on Amazon here.
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