Album: Jason Isbell & the 400 Unit, Here We Rest (Lightning Rod)

"Here we rest" was the original motto of Isbell's home state, Alabama, while the music locates the ex-Drive-By Trucker in a forest of local allusions foliated by the 400 Unit's ability to tinker, nicely but slightly blandly, with Alabama's indigenous musical genres: soul, rock, country, backwoods folk.

Isbell is an accomplished and serious songwriter and what keeps Here We Rest from being the stonker it so nearly is is not the writing but the slightness of his voice – and his band.