Hiss Golden Messenger is a strange name for the music of M.C. Taylor. Rather than preach the word, he’s often scoured for it, doubted and discarded it. Faith, he learned, cannot save you from depression or from the temptation to self-destruct, and when hypocrites can play it as their “get out of jail” card, what’s the use of it at all? God barely comes into the equation on the sixth Hiss album, recorded in Taylor’s 40th year—around the time when the Big Questions tend to get outweighed by smaller, more immediate responsibilities. But his lifelong theme remains intact: What happens when you feel a distance from the thing that’s meant to sustain you?
Hiss took flight with 2010’s Bad Debt, a record written in the quiet moments while Taylor’s newborn son slept. After years flailing in ’90s hardcore band Ex-Ignota and Americana outfit the Court and Spark, Taylor gave up trying, for the first time, to find an audience. The album’s charred hush found one anyway. Family and adulthood became central to the work, the revelations they offered making the hard times worthwhile. “The misery of love is a funny thing,” he sang on “Mahogany Dread” from 2014’s Lateness of Dancers. “The more it hurts, the more you think you can stand a little pain.”
The album’s success tested his thesis. As his Merge debut and breakout moment, it necessitated endless touring, taking him away from his wife and two young kids, who inspired the music and gave it purpose as a vocation. Heart Like a Levee is Taylor reckoning with the guilt of being an absent provider whose work financially supports his family—and spiritually sustains him as a good father. It’s not “rock star writes home,” but a familiar theme to anyone who’s felt pulled to honor disparate callings, and the rare record that doesn’t treat adulthood as a punchline or a final resting place.
Nor do the mature themes smother the songwriting, where Taylor locates a grounded soulfulness in his tapestry of folk, country, blues, and dub, whether he’s furrowing deeper into the groove he started digging on Lateness of Dancers—as on freewheeling standout “Ace of Cups Hung Low Band”—or easing back into his porch. Although Heart Like a Levee is often heavier than its sunny predecessor, the core Hiss band (Megafaun’s multi-instrumentalists Phil and Brad Cook, and drummer Matt McCaughan) tend to strike a major chord M.O., even when the lyrics are decidedly minor-chord: There are moments of profound communal joy here that continue the homespun gospel Taylor minted on Lateness. That contrast makes the music feel real and integral to a life, and the way that domesticity’s small lows and highs are always intermingled.
As rollicking as it often is, Heart Like a Levee is a deeply intimate record, filled with anxious conversations about obligation. “It’s hard, Lord/Lord, it’s hard,” he sings on capering opener “Biloxi,” surveying the scene at his eldest kid’s birthday party. “There’s one way in and one way out and we’re gonna have a good time.” The title track unfolds with Taylor and his wife laying in bed on an ostensibly perfect morning. “We’ll pretend all we wanna,” he sings with his trademark reedy nuance. “Yeah, tomorrow I’ll be on my way.” His high-pitched acoustic guitar mounts the tension as he unleashes a series of rhetorical questions, each more desperate than the last. “Will you grieve me, honey?” he asks in a wrenched tone, then skews quieter: “Did I give you a reason to try?” he asks in one of the album’s more flooring moments.
The pleas recur on “Happy Day (Sister My Sister),” a beautiful acoustic duet with Tift Merritt that sounds like a flood of relief but offers little of it. “Sister, my sister/What should I do?” Taylor sings with a sigh. “Should I wade in the river/With so many people living just/Just above the waterline?” If that sounds a little like liberal guilt, “Like a Mirror Loves a Hammer” is its flipside, exposing Taylor’s darkest inclinations to throw it all away rather than cause anyone more pain. “Should I drown in that Atlanta rain? Yes, babe—I can’t stand it,” he seethes, blurring into swampy dub funk shot through with mystic ricochets of reverb. The track stands alone in the record, its magnetic groove as myopic as Taylor’s mindset, doggedly pushing forward (and making the idea of a Have Fun With God-style album remix sound eminently necessary).
If all this makes touring life sound like too much trouble, Heart Like a Levee offers two songs that trace Taylor’s bond to the road. “I can feel October coming on the backscratch wind,” he yearns like a weathered traveler on “Cracked Windshield,” where the tiniest golden synth gradually casts a piercing light on his gentle ruminations. The tension finally breaks on the impressionistic “As the Crow Flies,” a subtle, cantering groove that breaks into a raucous height-of-summer refrain led by Phil Cook’s euphoric holler. “Blue horizon—late again/West Lafayette, babe/And tomorrow’s a dream,” Taylor sings, and the view seems endless.
Although younger male artists are returning to domestic settings in their music, there are few older male artists questioning how their work impacts upon the families they leave behind. It’s borderline inconceivable that a white, male, 40-something artist could bring a refreshing perspective to a traditional genre, but Taylor’s graceful accountability and invigorating songcraft makes him an anomaly. His own dose of perspective arrives at the end of the plainly gorgeous Heart Like a Levee.
“When I set the river on fire, you laughed in my face,” he recalls on “Highland Grace,” over an easy tumble of a groove, the words and music aligned for once. He ticks off his old stubbornnesses: “And if you can’t buy it and you stand and deny it/And if you can’t see it and you refuse to believe it/And if you can’t count it but you can’t help but doubt it,” he yearns over softly twiddling piano. “But loving her was easy/The easiest thing in the world.” Love as salvation is Old Testament songwriting, but few artists make you feel it like Taylor does.
