![]() ![]() The first sound we hear on the record is pretty acoustic and slide guitar, both played by Rateliff, and muted finger snaps, leading into a song about the final dissolution of his marriage delivered with admirable grace and equanimity. He often follows his dispirited heart into lovely melodic turns, as on the title track, a soft front-porch lope shaded by pedal steel and organ. Usually, though, Rateliff is too much of an innate crowd-pleaser to let the music get too dire, even if it would be within his rights to do so. The record’s final song “Rush On” is desolately primal Rateliff’s afflicted wail is starkly visceral, answered by banshee peels of distant guitar. ![]() The songs are built around his thick, tender voice and acoustic guitar playing, “They say you learn a lot out there, how to scorch and burn / Gonna have to bury your friends and then you’ll find it get worse,” sings Rateliff, who often seems to be singing in a kind of dialog with his dead friend.Īt times the music can be equally despondent “Tonight #2” evokes the Leonard Cohen of Songs of Love and Hate, as Rateliff’ leavens Cohen-esque vocal cadences with his own welcoming Rocky Mountain warmth. Rateliff’s latent genre slipperiness comes through on his new album, a solo set recorded sans the Night Sweats that turns away from soul music into a much more somber setting as he processes a divorce and the death of his friend, the musician-producer Richard Swift. Rateliff had previously tried his hand as an alt-rocker and singer-songwriter, so it was charming to see him rumble into his lane, even if it seemed a less likely one than his previous attempts at finding the right sound. Paying proud homage to Memphis soul, Rateliff’s 2015 hit “S.O.B.,” propelled towards mainstream popularity by a thrilling Jimmy Fallon performance, helped him sell half a million copies of Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats, which was followed by 2018’s Tearing at the Seams. A big bearded white guy from Colorado, he broke out singing brawny soul music with his band the Night Sweats. There is this constant back and forth battle in me personally and I am sure that comes out in my writing.Nathaniel Rateliff was one of the more surprising success stories of the 2010s, a decade that full of strange ones. Then my own neurosis, and maybe being a libra gets in the way, and I can’t make up my mind. I just continue to try to write from a place of hope. “When I was writing the record we were in the middle of a pandemic and our future looked pretty bleak. “I look at the album overall as a big question,” Rateliff says in a statement. Rateliff and the Night Sweats wrote and recorded The Future at the singer’s studio near Denver with producer Bradley Cook (Bon Iver, Brent Cobb). “You just feed upon fear you created,” he sings at one point, and “I’m afraid that the weight of the world is catching up to you” at another. While the title and his delivery may suggest a song of strength and confidence, it’s actually a dissertation on weakness. Rateliff and his seven-piece band preview The Future with the release of the song “Survivor.” “You think that I’m just some great survivor,” Rateliff sneers in the chorus. It’s the follow-up to Rateliff’s 2020 solo LP, And It’s Still Alright. The Future, his third with the group, will be released November 5th on Stax. ![]() Nathaniel Rateliff is reassembling the Night Sweats for a new album. ![]()
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