Consumer Guide Album

Elizabeth Cook: Exodus of Venus [Agent Love/Thirty Tigers, 2016]
In and around 2010's Welder, which finally got this 37-year-old Nashville pro some national cred, her marriage ended, her mother died, her father died, a brother died, her former mother- and father-in-law died, and her family farm went thataway. So why shouldn't this 2016 album be a substance abuse album? Begins with a title track in which sex is a drug and a damn good one: "Let's part the waters, let's walk the seas/Let's laugh in the face of modern disease" (and "Fall to pieces on some other day"). It closes by honoring a murdered Nashville 12-year-old who's already a cold case even though "five sex offenders live on this street." In between it's mostly drugs and entirely vivid and sardonic. I recommend every song but find myself recalling the on-the-road diptych "Broke Down in London on the M25": "I can drink myself dry/Long as I can stay alive." And then there's "Methadone Blues": "Look at those fools, it's like a welfare line/Good thing being a junkie ain't no crime/Now don't get them and me confused/Methadone, methadone, methadone blues." A