Skylar Gudasz grows throughout the free-flowing COUNTRY

Additionally, while the soundscapes on 2016’s Oleander and 2020’s Cinema served as efficient backdrops, Country’s sonics are more explorative and inventively complementary. The result is an integrated sequence that spotlights Gudasz’s growth as a songsmith, singer, and bandleader.

“Watercolor” shows Gudasz skillfully navigating her ambivalence. “I am water, I am color”, she asserts, then, in contrast, concluding, “I don’t want to die here with the bourgeoisie”: she feels part of and disconnected from the cosmic order. In this way, she captures the romantic’s dilemma: how the everyday is perceived as an impediment, though it is, paradoxically, the doorway to transcendence.

On “Mother’s Daughter”, the band gives Gudasz ample space to make tonal pivots and breathy transitions. The song brims with nostalgia regarding the way our parents pass on cliches, rituals, and philosophies that we internalize as children but need to reevaluate as adults. Then again, as much as we strive to distance ourselves from familial patterns, certain characteristics and propensities seem hardwired into the heart, the mind, the psyche.

“I tune my guitar to the names of old lovers”, Gudasz sings on “Fire Country”, her voice moving smoothly from lower to higher pitches. While Blue through The Hissing of Summer Lawns-era Joni Mitchell is a clear vocal and compositional source, Gudasz finds her own balance between narrative and tangential poeticisms, her band pivoting from austere segments to well-orchestrated passages.

“Atoll” is built around a sultry melody and such arresting images as “men in uniform” and “warships in the lagoon”. Mid-song, Gudasz goes full-protest, declaring, “war is a funeral”. While the song highlights the problematic aspects of human instinct – our bent for territorialism and scarcity-thinking – it also points to the beauty of regeneration (“coral’s coming back scientists say”).

“What you looking for out there girl?”, Gudasz moans on “Truck”, the album’s resident earworm. Depicting an adventurous spirit, the piece ripples with restlessness, the chorus immediately infectious. The almost 7-minute “Australia”, meanwhile, montages a relationship between a woman and a man “twice [her] age”. Again drawing from Joni Mitchell’s layered diarism and jazzy vocal style, Gudasz documents the couple’s dissolution, her lyrical details tugging at one, her vocal exuding melancholy and buoyancy, as well as an empathic vibe.

The album closes with the spacious “No Body”, Gudasz employing oblique imagery (“home is the shoreline”) and Shakespearean proclamations (“I have been with the witches / I have given my name”) to evoke the epic and quotidian aspects of intimacy. Gudasz goes on to address how we desire love but resist it, how self-doubt and suspiciousness endure, often to our own detriment (“Is the hero a hero? or is the hero a trickster?”).

Throughout Country, Gudasz balances skepticism and confidence, world-weariness and a lingering innocence. While her melodies are engaging, they mostly sprawl and are loosely constructed. Her voice, ultimately, is her chief asset – lush and inviting, occasionally elusive, alternately pained and stoical. Lyrically, too, she covers significant descriptive and thematic ground. With Country, Gudasz continues to reach for and frequently access new plateaus.