Samples of songs and sounds of hardship run through the backbone, pathos and grit and transcendence and perseverance come through, and connect you to a human experience.
But it's all undercut by the actual music. The guitars on Mississippi are overproduced and gross; the horns and drums on Lazarus are rhythmically disconnected from the desperate trudge, and Safflower descends into muzak schmaltz. That's a 3 song stretch that shows the whole problem: this bongs out gimmick, and not with a sincere engagement with the actual field recordings. It sounds ready to be plugged on NPR, sold at Starbucks, and hailed as the second coming of Moby's Play (which at least managed to be hooksome along the way) 2.5/5
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