Terry Allen - Lubbock (on everything) (2016)

5 stars; '50 Essential Albums of the 1970s.' Eccentric & uncompromising, savage & beautiful, literate & guttural. Rolling Stone // Raunchy, pithy, and deeply redolent ... lines quiver with a raw vision rarely heard in folk or country. Pitchfork // Legendary Texan artist Terry Allen occupies a unique position straddling the frontiers of country music and visual art; he has worked with everyone from Guy Clark to David Byrne to Lucinda Williams, and his artwork resides in museums worldwide. Widely acclaimed as a masterpiece, his deeply moving (and hilarious) satirical second album, a complex memory palace to his West Texas hometown Lubbock, is often cited as the urtext of alt-country. Produced in collaboration with the artist and meticulously remastered from the original analog tapes, this is the definitive edition: the first to correct the tape speed inconsistencies evident on all prior versions; the first U.S. vinyl reissue; the first CD to restore the full track listing; and the first to contextualize the record within Allen s 50-year career. Deluxe 2LP package includes tip-on gatefold jacket with lyrics, printed inner sleeves, download code, and 28 pp. book with related artwork and photos, an oral history by Allen, and essays by David Byrne, Lloyd Maines, and PoB. 2×CD edition features replica jacket, sleeves, and tipped-in 52 pp. book. Just four years separate Terry Allen's first and second albums and consecutive masterpieces, Juarez (1975) and Lubbock (on everything) (1979), but the two records inhabit completely different systems of worldbuilding, wildly divergent in terms of sonics, scope, and circumstance. Arguably Allen's most widely beloved and most easily approachable album it contains his 2 best-known and most covered songs, Amarillo Highway (for Dave Hickey) and New Delhi Freight Train (famously first recorded by Little Feat) Lubbock (on everything) is his complex memory palace to his West Texas hometown. Compared to its sparsely produced predecessor, it represents a much more collaborative, even collective, effort with a local Lubbock studio band, complete with rhythm section, pedal steel, fiddle, and horns, and helmed by master guitarist Lloyd Maines, who became Terry's frequent musical partner, producer, and the de facto bandleader of the Panhandle Mystery Band. Even if Allen's music is more accurately described as art-country, Lubbock (on everything) sowed the seeds of alt-country's emergence a decade later.