Hiss Golden Messenger’s I’m People celebrates community without embarrassment

Hiss Golden Messenger’s I’m People received a 21 May review, putting M.C. Taylor’s latest album back into the indie-folk and Americana conversation. The record is his first after leaving Merge Records for Chrysalis, and it sounds like a deliberate embrace of community, shared feeling and the almost old-fashioned belief that music can still bring people into the same room for a reason.

That could easily become sentimental, but Taylor’s best songs have always been grounded in real human spaces: small clubs, family life, friendship, spiritual exhaustion, political worry and the need to keep singing anyway. I’m People appears to lean into that communal ideal more directly than some of his recent work.

Co-produced by Josh Kaufman of Bonny Light Horseman, with contributions connected to Rising Appalachia, the Mountain Goats, I’m With Her, Spacebomb and Bruce Hornsby, the album sounds like a gathering as much as a solo statement. Songs such as Seneca, Who You Gonna Run To?, Last Orders and Depends on the River frame music as a renewable source of belonging.

For a 21 May digest, this is a warm and useful counterweight to the harsher JPEGMAFIA release: a record about people needing people, made by an artist who still believes that sincerity can survive irony. Source: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hiss-golden-messenger-im-people