Wayne Graham - Bastion (2024) [Hi-Res]

Released on Tyler Childers' Hickman Holler label through Thirty Tigers, this is the ninth studio album from the Kentucky-based band, produced by brothers Kenny and Hayden Miles. Wayne Graham have long been at the forefront of the new movement of artists shaping the New Appalachian Sound - shaped by tradition, but intentionally set on forging a new sonic landscape. The new album, Bastion firmly establishes them as the architects of a new sound coming from the region. The songs on the album are treated like the complex feelings we feel, vague and cloaked in mystery, or sometimes blunt and pleading for change. Different instruments wash in and out like a stream of thoughts; some soothing, some disruptive. Year after year, our perspectives unravel into new version after new version, losing vital information with each update. The songs on this record speak to the forgetting. The name or phrase on the tip of our tongue that we can’t say, because it’s hiding in our mind behind a worry or distraction. “Because every song starts as a question, we attempt to avoid the urge to find an answer, and we ask more questions.” When nothing is “100%” anything, then what is concrete enough to define fully? No definitions here, just ideas with no value outside of their real time impact on the thinker. No promise of understanding, and all you can do is sing.