It’s a tale as old as time: When a singer-songwriter wants to plumb the depths of his soul, he needs to step away from his main gig so he can get down to what’s real. Nathaniel Rateliff adheres to this weathered cliche with And It’s Still Alright, his first album without the Night Sweats since 2015 but not his first solo album, not by a long shot. The Night Sweats was his last-gasp attempt at the big time, a neo-soul combo that helped reposition the Denver troubadour as a soul man—a transition aided by producer Richard Swift, who became a friend and a trusted collaborator.
Swift died unexpectedly in 2018, the same year Rateliff divorced his wife after a “tumultuous” relationship. The twin losses inspired the singer/songwriter to record the melancholy, meditative And It’s Still Alright, an album designed to be everything a Night Sweats record is not: intimate, confessional, bittersweet. Rateliff cut the album in part to fulfill a promise to Swift, who told the songwriter, “Keep pushing for those Harry Nilsson tunes, man”—to which Rateliff responded, “Well, we’ll see how Nilsson I can get.”
The answer is, not very Nilsson at all, not even when Rateliff takes pains to stage his own Pandemonium Shadow Show—laboring to replicate the iconic songwriter’s whimsical melodies on “All or Nothing,” or giving “Expecting to Lose” a swaying sing-song bridge. In any case, evoking the ghost of Harry Nilsson is a particularly odd move from Rateliff, since Nilsson—one of pop’s great eccentrics, who recently received a boost when his “Gotta Get Up” was featured in Natasha Lyonne’s Netflix series Russian Doll— was never exactly a paragon of sincerity. Even at his quietest moments, Nilsson favored a bit of the old razzle-dazzle: His celebrated 1970 LP Nilsson Sings Newman doubles as an interpretive masterstroke and a display of studio wizardry, where he proved his vocal virtuosity by overdubbing every harmony part. If Rateliff is anything, it’s doggedly earnest. Whether he’s grinding out old-school soul with the Night Sweats or flying solo, he’s obsessed with the idea of authenticity: the idea that a song isn’t a song unless it can be convincingly played alone on an acoustic guitar.
Ultimately, this old folkie notion of purity triumphs over Rateliff’s composerly aspirations. The lion’s share of And It’s Still Alright backslides to the gormless balladeering of his decade-old Rounder debut, In Memory of Loss—a record made when he was under the spell of M. Ward, peddling himself as “bi-curious, redneck indie-folk” and touring with Bon Iver. Set aside the Nilsson pastiche and a lingering echo of the Lumineers—most prominent on “Mavis,” which he stresses is not named after Mavis Staples, even though that’s the first Mavis that would come to most listeners’ minds—and Alright can seem like a collection of artifacts excavated from Rateliff’s early years. He strums and he mumbles, twisting in his melancholy without bothering to shape his mood into melodies. If he’s baring his soul, his revelations are buried within his slurred, mangled phrasing, a delivery that repels the close listen it’s intended to invite.
That mush mouth is supposed to be the opposite of the retro R&B bluster that Rateliff hauls out for the Night Sweats, but the two extremes are really just different expressions of the same affectation. Rateliff bends his vocal attack to suit his chosen musical style. With the Night Sweats, he’s elevated with grit and muscle, but strumming solo on And’s Still Alright, he gets bogged down in a melancholy murk.
Buy: Rough Trade
