Tyler Childers

• Purgatory [Hickman Holler, 2017] A−
• Live on Red Barn Radio I & II [Thirty Tigers/Hickman Holler, 2018] A−
• Country Squire [RCA/Hickman Holler, 2019] A−
• Can I Take My Hounds to Heaven? [RCA, 2022] ★★★
• Rustin' in the Rain [RCA/Hickman Holler, 2023] A
• Snipe Hunter [Hickman Holler/RCA, 2025] A

Consumer Guide Reviews:

Purgatory [Hickman Holler, 2017]
This intense, narrow, flawlessly crafted retro-nuevo honky-tonk album gains decisive poetry from both Childers's lean, resonant East Kentucky drawl and his failure to shake his fundamentalist upbringing--purgatory, in case you didn't get the message, is a Romanist notion. "Do you reckon He lets free will boys / Mope around in purgatory?" he asks the Catholic girl he hopes to hedge his bets with, and damned if she doesn't slow him down some. "Darlin' to me but that's missus to you," he boasts. "Still on the road 'cause I ain't good for nothing / But writing the songs that I sing," he contextualizes. A−

Live on Red Barn Radio I & II [Thirty Tigers/Hickman Holler, 2018]
Born in 1991, Childers was no longer a kid in 2013 and 2014, when he recorded the two four-song EPs combined here. But he wasn't yet a man either. Instead, he was just old enough to know how good he was at the songwriting stuff even if he had trouble with the life stuff the songs drew on: "I believe if I could find my keys/I'd try to drive away" are the words of somebody who doesn't know whether "it's the wine or the coke/That makes her sound like her jaw is broke." Such well-turned dilemmas dominate this phase of his repertoire. The most manly is a heart-tugger about a pal's dead grandma: "Back when all us boys were tryin'/To make sense of all these strings/I can see her in the corner/Singin' along to all our crazy dreams." A−

Country Squire [RCA/Hickman Holler, 2019]
This guy can write. For the second straight album, he mixes a few sure-shot classics into nine straight winners--imaginatively observed, acutely colloquial songs of the Appalachian life, the musician's lot, or both. On 2017's Purgatory I loved the way he pivoted off the title into the doctrinal matters that still persist where fundamentalism rules, for the object of his special affection is a papist so unbiblical as to believe there's a place between heaven and hell. Here he's apparently married this infidel, a paragon who texted him the selfies that inspire the juiciest wanking song in the literature--"It gets so hard out on the road," so thank the Lord the motel has his "favorite lotion" and his "Ever Lovin' Hand." Other topics include the muse he can't refuse, the '66 camper he's customizing, a school bus driver who'll paddle your ass, and the high price of peace of mind. A−

Can I Take My Hounds to Heaven? [RCA, 2022]
That I respect his compulsion to sing two CDS worth of church songs rousingly in two different styles doesn't mean all that music isn't a little more than an atheist can swallow ("Old Country Church," "Can I Take My Hounds to Heaven?") ★★★

Rustin' in the Rain [RCA/Hickman Holler, 2023]
A mere seven songs lasting a mere 28 minutes, this is the album the no longer merely "promising" 32-year-old lassos and rides back to the barn. It's also the greatest album ever to include a song about percheron mules ("Percheron Mules," it's called) or to the best of my knowledge a secular song that quotes all of Luke 2 8-10, which might time out rather well as a Christmastime hit. "Help Me Make It Through the Night" cover--right, been done before, but not a whole lot better. Not done before is a song to someone--a male buddy, sounds like, maybe "I consider us friends" indicates otherwise and maybe it doesn't--who's stopped answering his emails. In case you're wondering what his singing's like, as by now you should be, well--high, intense, committed to a natural drawl he may exaggerate an iota or two that just makes the music more compelling. Final song begins: "I never want to leave this world/Without sayin' I love you." As someone who knows that feeling, I'm convinced he lives it. A

Snipe Hunter [Hickman Holler/RCA, 2025]
"For the birds," this young Kentuckian "worked with words," and that was just the beginning, so that circa 2017 he found himself "road-doggin' in a stripped-out van" with a lot more to come—seven albums in, he finds himself getting to the bottom of an "angst hard-fought to learn" in such locales as first Australia and then India as he essays the first country album ever to enlist the words "pheromone" or, uh-oh, "chlamydia." "Keep your nose on the grindstone and out of the pills," he's warned by his coalminer dad, who you get the feeling had more luck with the grindstone than the pills himself. When Childers emerged from nowhere circa 2017 he had the lineaments of a regional phenom—in one of my favorite strokes, he courted a Catholic girl. Wowing the other side of the world as he ponders the Bhagavad Gita, however, he clearly intends to wow you too. A