Arlo McKinley
This Mess We’re In
OH BOY
ABOVE THE CURRENT
Arlo McKinley might be in his early forties, but the music he makes predates him by at least a couple of decades. Which is to say the Cincinnati native’s brand of country sounds like it could have been recorded in the genre’s heyday. Just listen to the lilting nostalgia of this new full-length’s second song, “City Lights,” which saunters along with a heavy heart that’s matched only by the graceful, uplifting twang of its melody. It’s pure, full-on melancholy, yet at the same time it’s anything but—a profound happy-sadness that captures the extremes of the human experience, the highs and lows of being alive.
McKinley knows something about that. He, as well as many of his friends, previously struggled with opioid addiction and abuse—so much so that it made its way into the song “Bag of Pills” on 2020’s Die Midwestern. He’s familiar with heartbreak as well, both romantic and mortal. At the beginning of that same year, his mother died, followed not too soon after by country-folk legend John Prine, who had signed McKinley to his Oh Boy label. In fact, he was the last artist Prine signed. Needless to say, the heaviness of those experiences and that loss bleed into his work—both the decade or so’s worth of tunes that found their way into Die Midwestern and this newer collection.
Perhaps nothing demonstrates the songwriter’s knack for translating the heartbreaking nature of existence to music better than “Stealing Dark From the Night Sky,” a gorgeous, forlorn love song that manages to capture the profound and timeless infinity of it in a few simple lines: “My heart is yours for the takin’ if you want to take it / I know you’re scared you might break it / Girl, it’s been breakin’ all my life.” That’s devastating enough, but then comes the real kicker, despite its purported solace: “I’ve been running on empty like the ones here before me / And all this hurt our hearts are hauling hurts a little less each day.” In other words, time might heal, but you never completely forget.
That damage and desolation is matched in the desperate longing of the title track. A striking piano-laced ballad, it sees McKinley declare that “This time it’s the real thing”—but such is the sad gravitas of his voice, it’s hard to believe him. Elsewhere, there’s the abject loneliness of “Rushintherug” and the hopelessly hopeful regret of “I Wish I,” before it all comes grinding to a heart-stopping halt with closer “Here’s to the Dying,” a universal yet also specific examination of human life and human death, and the not-too-extended distance between the two. An incredible record that makes no bones about fucking you up good and proper.
