NEW ALBUMS
PARKER MILLSAP
Be Here Instead
Adventurous fifth album from Oklahoma troubadour
THIRTY TIGERS
7/10
Stuck at home in Nashville, Millsap has used enforced confinement to upgrade his gritty folk troubadour shtick into something considerably more expansive. Stadium rock grandeur (“Dammit”), psych-soul (“Vulnerable”) and off-kilter piano ballads (“Empty”) join more familiar acoustic guitar tropes (“In Between”). At the same time, his lyrics have grown more introspective, and best of all is “The Real Thing”, which sums up the last year in three pungent minutes – it started as a song about missing his wife while on the road and ended up about being starved of human interaction for an entirely different reason.