On its straightforward but deeply felt sixth album, the Ohio rock band positions music itself as a salve against the horrors of the world.
Erika Wennerstrom succinctly lays out the Heartless Bastards’ motivation on “Revolution,” the epic opener to the band’s sixth album. “Big Brother’s watching you and trying to sell you something new,” she sings, as though she’s trying to warn you away from a cliff edge or a Facebook questionnaire. “And I just want to take away, take away the blues.” Music has always been her salve against the horrors of the world, a means of buttressing her mental health, and now on A Beautiful Life, it’s a corrective to late-stage capitalism. The song’s sentiment—“The revolution is in your mind”—might sound straightforward and her nostalgia for the days before fake news a bit pat, but the music is ambitious, even thrilling. The song opens with just Wennerstrom’s voice and guitar, then builds gradually to a crunchy, jangly payoff that’s one of the best and most bracing moments in the Bastards’ catalog.
Like their fellow Ohioans the Black Keys, the Heartless Bastards started out as a fairly spartan throwback rock band, pounding out sturdy, bluesy plaints on their 2005 debut, Stairs and Elevators. But they have grown beyond that sound with each album, dipping into country music on 2009’s The Mountain and classic rock on 2012’s Arrow. Through it all, Wennerstrom’s voice has remained the most distinctive instrument in the band’s sound, although she has had trouble calibrating that mighty instrument to quieter moments, especially on 2006’s All This Time. A Beautiful Life is her best album as a vocalist, as she finds new ways to bend her voice to different styles and sounds. She’s not trying to drown out all the bad news; instead, she sings her lyrics like mantras, as though constantly reminding herself to take deep breaths and find perspective. “You got to let go of your worry,” she tells herself on “Doesn’t Matter Now.” “Oh honey, you didn’t do nothing wrong.”
Leading a band of session players and sidemen—including members of Okkervil River, White Denim, and My Morning Jacket, not to mention longtime Bastards bassist Jesse Ebaugh—Wennerstrom dips into the 1960s to create a kaleidoscopic palette. Situated at the center of the album, “The River” and “Photograph” are free-floating, hallucinogenic forays into crunchy psychedelia. “You Never Know” takes it back a few years, piling on the lush orchestration and staccato strings of mid-decade bouffant pop, and Wennerstrom layers her voice to sound perfectly at home channeling Dusty Springfield and Cilla Black.
A Beautiful Life is inevitably grounded in the worries of the here and now. “Have you forgotten when there was a time filled with hope instead of fear that’s in your heart?,” she asks on “Revolution.” It’s a misnomer, however, to call it a political album, because Wennerstrom internalizes all of that fear and anxiety. Her songs are less about specific issues and more about her own personal responses to them. Her lyrics occasionally sound like talking points (“Oh, the world is filled with so much greed”) or, worse, like cliches (“If at first you don’t succeed/ Try, try again”), and she ends the album by deferring to the Beatles’ most overused line: “All you need is love.” But every song here poses the same essential questions: How do you keep living in a world that presents nothing but ugliness? Where do you find something nurturing, something sustaining, something beautiful? “Music” might sound like too easy an answer, but at its best this album makes it sound like an epiphany.
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