Few R&B albums have a pedal steel; few alt-country albums have a rap feature. Faye Webster’s Atlanta Millionaires Club somehow has all of the above. Even stranger, she manages to smooth these apparent contradictions into serene folk-pop with a mellow soul tinge. A musician and photographer known for monochromatic, winkingly humorous portraits of Atlanta hip-hop figures, Webster is releasing her third album at just 21 years old. It has the melancholy clarity of someone twice her age, and a dreamy transience perfect for an overcast Sunday.
Webster’s very first album, 2013’s Run & Tell, was polished traditional folk, inspired by country and bluegrass passed down by her musician mother and grandfather. While not adventurous, it’s remarkably pleasant; it’s hard to believe it’s the work of a 16-year-old, much less one who’d only been writing songs for two years. After a brief stint at college in Nashville, she returned home to Atlanta and recorded a self-titled 2017 album for Awful Records, the musical collective better known for its roster of left-field rap acts. Alongside artists like Father and Ethereal, Webster was an anomaly, but her arty individualism represented an important common value. Faye Webster kept the pedal steel but traded twangy guitars for soulful orchestral accents and groovier rhythms, gliding on the spun-gold thread of Webster’s voice, now sounding less like Emmylou Harris and more like herself.
She’s not a particularly powerful singer; she aims for the wistful plaintiveness to match her self-deprecating acceptance that things sometimes work out for everyone else but you. The album cruises with a casual slackness that can camouflage the precision of its production, like the horn flourishes that enliven light-stepping tearjerkers “Hurts Me Too” and “Jonny.” Kacey Musgraves and Natalie Prass are apt comparisons, but Webster sounds equally at home on a country song as she does singing hooks for Awful recording artists. Father murmurs a nonchalant verse on “Flowers,” the most unusual song here, with a molasses-slow boom-clap and tinkling music-box melody. “What do you prefer?/I don’t have that much to offer,” Webster sings, shifting into whispery sing-song.
Webster’s hyper-modern brand of cool moves with a swiftness that can make her interest in internet rap seem vintage, and her throwback non-musical passions—baseball and trick yo-yoing—seem trendy. Yet her sharply observed and simply stated lyrics land with immediacy. “The day that I met you I started dreaming,” she sings on album centerpiece “Kingston,” a lush, slow-building fantasy of romantic escape. She writes with refreshing obviousness about life as a homebody (“My dog is my best friend, and he doesn’t even know what my name is”), or how it feels to end a relationship with someone who’s also in the entertainment biz (“Right now your picture is all over Atlanta, no matter which way that I drive”). Even at her lowest, she doesn’t sound sorry for herself, preferring to let the pedal steel do the crying.
Plenty of currently trendsetting popular music resists precise categorization. In the case of a Khalid or a Diplo, this impulse can lead to stream-friendly mush. Webster is a bit too weird to fall into that trap; even when her path appears incongruous, one never has the sense that she’s acting other than as she intended. Idiosyncratic yet understated, Atlanta Millionaires Club wraps in a little of everything without doing too much of anything.
