Ian Noe

Noe’s latest album, River Fools and Mountain Saints is a familiar and resonant portrait of growing up Appalachian, told with descriptive brushstrokes that evoke some of Americana’s master storytellers. The cover photo on Ian Noe’s exceptional new album, River Fools and Mountain Saints, is like a still life image. Noe is sitting on a stool in a cinder block basement surrounded by old jars, bottles and other artifacts of an earnest, hardscrabble life. It’s a fitting choice given that the songs on the record — sparse, unvarnished close-ups of modern America, populated with everyday objects — themselves feel like still life works of art.

One of Noe’s great strengths as a songwriter is the ease in which he establishes mood and sense of place. The album’s first brushstrokes paint a scene on a Kentucky hillside, hard up moonshiners tending a still, with a discarded plow, wagon wheel and old milk cow filling out the frame. Still life art emerged as a reaction to romanticism, a period of mythmaking and idealizing the approved heroes of the past. The new artists preferred realism, and the simple truth of a pitcher or bowl of fruit.

In this follow-up album to his acclaimed debut, Between the Country, Noe zooms in on the rivers, mountains and rich characters of his native eastern Kentucky. The mundane objects he places near them — coffee cans, basketballs, a chair with a coat on it, a cat on a truck, a horsefly, church house vents, a pocket knife, an old box fan — give his songs an additional measure of specificity, context and truth.

FOR FANS OF: Brent Cobb, Charley Crockett, Colter Wall