In Review: Jason Isbell—Foxes in the Snow, Neil Young—Oceanside Countryside, Bob Mould—Here We Go Crazy
Plus The Devil Makes Three—Spirits
Jason Isbell—Foxes in the Snow [2025]
Stripped to the bone, featuring nothing more than his voice and acoustic guitar, Foxes in the Snow feels like an extended exhale, an album Jason Isbell needed to get out of his system. Anybody who follows Isbell knows the reason for his urgency. Isbell filed for a divorce from Amanda Shires in December 2023, bringing to a close a decade where the pair's personal and professional lives were intertwined. The couple spent those ten years never shying away from the struggles of building a relationship in the wake of Isbell entering recovery, either in the press or in song. Running With Our Eyes Closed, a documentary chronicling the making of Weathervanes, suggested their marital tensions were reaching a boiling point but the divorce still felt like a shock, the Americana equivalent of the Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon split.
Knowledge of the artist's personal life isn't a prerequisite for understanding Foxes in the Snow. The record is stark and unadorned, directing all attention toward Isbell's keening voice, making his intentions clear: he's sorting through the wreckage of his old life with the intention of starting something new. Having the rebirth intertwined with the postmortum gives Foxes in the Snow a peculiar power, capturing the messy, conflicting feelings that arise in the aftermath of end of a longterm relationship.
As compelling as those mixed emotions may be, they also lend Foxes in the Snow a voyeuristic veneer for those with even a passing understanding of the Isbell and Shires union—which is to say, most of the singer/songwriter's audience. That sense of eavesdropping is accentuated by Isbell's decision to dispense with short stories in favor of diaristic bloodspilling that plays like midnight confessions. He's not merely drawing candid portraits of a curdled marriage, he's copping to the flush of a new romance. It's an unexpected twist in the narrative that carries a slightly dissonant note for any listener who was once invested in the Isbell/Shires fable. He apologizes to his partner on "Gravelweed," singing "I'm sorry the love songs all mean different things today," a line that may also apply the compositions on Foxes in the Snow someday. Today, it's a bit difficult to hear them as anything other than a response to a painful divorce but they're so sturdy, so clear in their melodies and structure, they may be easier to appreciate after all the headlines have faded and Isbell has settled into his new life.
Neil Young—Oceanside Countryside [1977; 2025]
The Neil Young Archives and its Analog Originals offshoot give the lie to the notion that all great albums are made with a grand idea in mind. Over the last eight or so years, Young has excavated a series of scrapped records from his vaults, all recorded and completed somewhere between 1976 and 1978.