'Love Songs for Losers' by The Lone Bellow
Not all music is meant for philosophical depth, intellectual exaltation or even something that you can just dance to. Some music is meant for the simple pleasures of pretty melodies, foursquare instrumental execution, and universally experienced emotions.
That’s no insult to either the Lone Bellow or the Nashville-based group’s fifth long-player, Love Songs for Losers. After working with the National’s Aaron Dessner and Americana favorite Dave Cobb, the band reassigns production among its members—Brian Elmquist co-produces the whole thing, while Kanene Donehey Pipkin is vocal producer—and proves the songs are, and have always been, central.
The long-standing teamwork helps: Zach Williams remains the lead singer but some songs simply ask for Pipkin and Elmquist to take over, and the regular sidemen, bassist Jason Pipkin (Kanene’s husband) and drummer Julian Dorio, resume their places with casual fitness.
Any stylistic shifts are similarly casual and serious: “Caught Me Thinkin’” rides from Nashville to Memphis on jets blown by particularly shiny horns, “I’m in Love” seems to build atop a guitar riff from Rick Springfield’s “Jessie’s Girl,” and “Honey” opens the album with keyboards that aren’t that far away from early-‘80s New Wave moods.
Those referents work better for the Lone Bellow than they do for more deliberately mainstream neo-Nashville artistes, perhaps because the band doesn’t lose the connection to its roots in the same kind of soil that has nourished folk, rock, and country from Patsy Cline to Bruce Springsteen.
Williams is a good basic singer, too, with shades of Irish troubadour Glen Hansard and the less strident side of Cat Stevens; for their parts, Pipkin adds high color to the bluesy torch of “Cost of Living” and Elmquist is sweetly heartbroken in the piano ballad “Dreaming.” Together, they make Love Songs for Losers a deeply simple comfort.
