NEW ALBUMS
AMERICANA
Preaching to the converted
MICHAEL SMITH, ALEXA KING
TODD SNIDER
First Agnostic Church Of Hope And Wonder
THIRTY TIGERS
9/10
East Nashville renegade expands his virtual revival tent
TODD SNIDER didn’t plan on becoming a bullshit preacher. As the pandemic bit hard into his busy touring schedule last year, he also found himself processing the recent deaths of various musician friends – among them early mentor John Prine and sometime collaborator Jeff Austin, formerly of Yonder Mountain String Band. To counter his despondency, Snider conceived the idea of a virtual church or tent revival, performing a livestream show on Sunday mornings.
Starting last October, these weekly events, in which Snider would play his fairly extensive back catalogue in sequence, were billed as The First Agnostic Church Of Hope And Wonder.
Now he’s used the title as a repository for a healthy batch of new songs, delivered in the loose conceptual robes of a mischievous layman. It’s rooted in syncopated grooves and skittish funk (courtesy of drummer Robbie Crowell and multi-instrumentalist Tchad Blake), allowing Snider’s droll, sharply observational lyrical sermons to flow over the top. Or, as he puts it, “funk in back and busking up front, with White Album-y shit scattered about”.
Impishness reigns on songs such as “Stoner Yodel Number One” and the parodic “Agnostic Preacher’s Lament”, the latter a one-way dialogue with God that ends on a note of casual remorse: “I took a lot of money from these people/ And they’re starting to ask a lot of questions/So forgive me or whatever”. But it’s tempered by great compassion and a controlled sense of rage. “That Great Pacific Garbage Patch” concerns the environmental shame of floating islands of ocean plastic and the indifference that often seems to accompany the issue. “Never Let A Day Go By” urges us to seize the day; the allusive “Battle Hymn Of The Album” revives abolitionist John Brown for a divided, post-Trump America.