Bartees Strange

★★★★ Farm To Table 4AD. CD/DL/LP

Ipswich-born, DC-based indie-rocker with heart on sleeve – and talent to burn.

Bartees Strange’s second album is entirely without irony; its emotional power will make you glad that is the case. Formerly employed by an environmental non-profit and Brooklyn punks Stay Inside, Strange now deals in elegantly volcanic indie rock, with a love of exultant hooks, and a soaring, soulful voice. There’s playfulness here, too – check the vocodered shoutouts to his celeb friends on Co-Sign – but Farm To Table peaks as Strange makes poetry of the big issues. Its beautiful intensity evoking Jeff Buckley, Tours finds Strange making peace with the absence of his military father throughout his youth; Hold The Line, about

George Floyd’s daughter Gianna, is a subtly devastating meditation on loss. Hennessy, meanwhile, bears aloft its resonant meditation on hope and blackness with grace and poetry. Strange’s earnestness is artful, and Farm To Table an uplifting triumph.