COURTNEY MARIE ANDREWS
Loose Future (Fat Possum)
Previous release from Courtney Marie Andrews, May Your Kindness Remain, from 2018, may be seen by many as one of the definitive Americana releases this century, but the Phoenix musician has once again refused to be typecast with another character shift in Loose Future from the suppressed melancholy of Old Flowers of two years ago.
Loose Future is brief: with 10 songs all under four minutes, the album is very much in a country-pop vein that (as it was a decade ago with Taylor Swift) can only be compared to Kacey Musgraves. But Andrews uses the lightness of pop to express her emotions, rather than going for the hook-laden stylings of Musgraves.
The result is that Loose Future doesn’t hit the emotional highs of …Kindness… or provide the earworms of country-pop’s big hitters, but it is an album of positivity and renewal after Old Flowers that shows just how much Andrews has to give.
words JOHN-PAUL DAVIES