At just 20, Dylan LeBlanc already sounds world-weary and thoroughly worn out. Seriously, we’re putting too much pressure on young people these days!
Yet to fret on modern concerns would be to miss the point of ‘Paupers Field’. Defiantly retro, the album’s ‘late evening on the porch’ style country rock does nothing new. However Dylan LeBlanc does excel in songcraft, belying his years to produce something remarkably mature and confident.
Framed by the most minimal of instrumentation songs such as ‘Tuesday Night Rain’ are buoyed by a peculiarly Southern melancholy – a soft downward lilt in LeBlanc’s voice wraps those memories in a beautiful nostalgia. At times recalling the keening tone of Jim James, the singer has the same reverb drenched sense of times lost as his My Morning Jacket counterpart.
On some tracks, the youthful songwriter stretches credibility too far, adding stock references to an Old South he could not possibly have experienced. Yet throughout Dylan LeBlanc is rarely less than charming. A superb stylist, ‘Paupers Field’ is a deeply evocative record, even if the time and place is not his own.
7/10
Dig This? Dig Deeper! My Morning Jacket, Neil Young, Conor Oberst
