Modern Country

Like its MCA spiritual predecessors, Modern Country shows what a great musician can do when he decides his skill is the least important part of the package.

Tyler explores the boundless opportunities within a few great riffs, while drifting from time to time to explore odd structural detours.

Doubtless, it will all sound great in the car. [Aug 2016, p.93]

An instrumental album that never fails to hold the listeners attention, with a plethora of quotable passages and delightful moments. A coming of age album.

The sprawl of motion, texture, and color is reined in by immense, emotive lyricism and dynamic group interplay, making this musical "letter" to his vanishing nation well worth repeated listening.

“Highway Anxiety” shimmers with melancholy and evocative locomotive persistence; “Gone Clear” travels from Tyler’s intricate fingerpicking to a barrage of chiming bells and back again.

The result is an album that feels rich and rewarding, revealing new details on each listen.

Backed by an all-star band that notably includes Wilco’s Glenn Kotche and Megafaun’s Phil Cook, Tyler is able to summon a wide range of moods, from plaintive pastoral folk to a particular kind of kosmische American music that fuses Brad Cook’s spacey synths and Luke Schneider’s gorgeous pedal steel like a slow, steady breeze on a hot summer day.

There is beauty and anguish to poring through Tyler’s songbook, a reckoning with spirits that refuse to die even as the world spins on furiously and without regard for the passages of humankind not willed or fortunate enough to keep up with the storm.

At a time when a generation of US roots guitarists are reaching creative maturity, Modern Country reasserts Tyler's place at their forefront. [Jul 2016, p.81]

Modern Country is a conceptually ambitious, heartfelt undertaking. Some might notice the lack the unbridled colour that characterized Impossible Truth, but ultimately, it isn't enough to hinder the listener's experience.

Whether he’s teasing out the darkest parts of America’s history with an acoustic guitar, or allowing a genteel tremolo to ring as a meditation on modernization, it’s easy to get caught up in the disorienting, psychedelic drift of past becoming present. It’s even easier to just relax and float downstream.

A tender, if idiosyncratic, celebration of the folk, country, and minimalist forms that inform Tyler's work.

Tyler has crafted eight instrumentals that augment his lilting fingerpicking with stately keyboards and brisk beats. Aside from a few minutes of white-line numbness, it’s a salutary combination. [No. 132, p.61]