Midland, Connoisseurs Of Country Craft, Evolves Its Vintage Sound
It's been more than 20 years since the late sociologist Richard Peterson argued, in his landmark book Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity, against the perception that country music tends to evolve in one direction, from traditional sounds toward pop-influenced ones. Peterson mapped out an ongoing dialectic between "hard-core and soft-shell expressions," pointing out, for instance, that country's commercial momentum shifted from uptown Adult Contemporary balladeers like Barbara Mandrell, Anne Murray and Kenny Rogers to a new crop of down-home neo-traditionalists like Randy Travis, Ricky Skaggs and the Judds over the course of the 1980s.
If anything, distinctions between different aesthetic and cultural sensibilities have gotten increasingly blurry. The past decade has, after all, been one of male hit-makers borrowing heavily from contemporary pop, rap and even emo, while also doubling down on rural signifiers and settings in song lyrics and videos. Few of those acts would fall into country's crooning tradition, but a number of them have learned suave phrasing from contemporary R&B and hip-hop. More and more, they've focused on channeling muscled-up masculinity into gentility.
Midland emerged into a country world in flux. In 2016, the Texas-based trio — comprised of Mark Wystrach, Jess Carson and Cameron Duddy — had detected enough of an overlap in the ways their musical minds worked to leave behind other careers and form a canny, harmony-centric country band, catching listeners off-guard with a taut, full of vintage reference points. Now, with a '90s country revival in the mainstream, Midland's mining of the past doesn't seem so isolated. But its sophomore album, , is a showcase of the subtle arts that distinguish the band. Connoisseurship and finesse are Duddy, Carson and Wystrach's preferred tools. Theirs is a different understanding of softness.
