Here are 3 new albums you should know about this week

Chris Stapleton just cleaned up at the CMAs, winning Album Of The Year for From A Room: Volume 1 and Best Male Vocalist for the third year in a row. This continues a Nashville Cinderella story that kicked off with his successful 2015 debut album, Traveller, resulting in his leap from behind-the-scenes songwriter to country-music superstar in his own right. Stapleton’s gravelly vocals sell his own openly emotive songs like no one else could, the poetic imagery in tracks like “Scarecrow In The Garden” transcending typical beer-and-babes fodder: “The fields were green as dollars / ’Cause the dirt was black as night.” The lighter “Millionaire” praises love over lucre, as harmonies from Stapleton’s wife, Morgane, underline its sweet message—which is about as sappy as Stapleton gets. Still, he runs the gamut of emotions and genres, traveling from the hard-rocking rumination on the difficulties of “Hard Livin’” to the minimalist blues of “Nobody’s Lonely Tonight.”

RIYL: Pickup trucks. The softer side of Waylon Jennings. Nashville episodes that focus on Deacon.

Start here: The infectious guitar riffs of “Midnight Train To Memphis” expertly ride the rails between country and rock. [Gwen Ihnat]

Neil Young & Promise Of The Real, The Visitor

[Reprise]
Grade: C-

Can Neil Young change anyone’s mind about politics at this point? That’s a rhetorical question whose obvious answer is “no,” but that clearly hasn’t stopped the grizzled rock godfather from trying, yet again, with The Visitor. Once again backed by Promise Of The Real—the young, basic, bluesy outfit led by Willie Nelson’s son Lukas that also played on 2015’s The Monsanto Years—Young rails against the awful state of American politics but also declares his love for his adopted country: “I’m Canadian, by the way / And I love the USA,” he begins right at the top, with Young ham-handedly reacting to “Make America Great Again” with “Already Great.” The Visitor continues in that vein, and there’s not much to recommend it. Young and the youngsters he’s playing with here sound like they wrote and jammed these songs out in a few days, relying on the strength of his sentiment to carry them through. But a jam session with some cranky speak-singing on it doesn’t make for a great album, and it’s not going to make any new converts, unfortunately—either to Neil Young’s politics or his music.

RIYL: Validated opinions, only crotchety. Neil Young at his speak-singiest.

Start here: “Already Great,” the album’s first song, pretty much tells the whole story. It’s no “Ohio.” [Josh Modell]