Black Crow Blue

The American landscape Nathan Bell captures on Black Crow Blue is bleak and lonesome but also graced with courage and nobility. These are unsparingly honest songs with the diamond-edged eloquence of Hemingway’s prose. Bell draws upon literary inspirations (including the poetry of his father) to craft his lyrics, then sets them to guitar-centered melodies rooted in classic folk and blues forms. A reoccurring character named Crow flits through a number of tracks that invoke the vast grandeur of the Southwest. In between, Bell offers an elegy to the late author Larry Brown (“Me and Larry”), embodies a hard-pressed working man (“Stone’s Throw”) and sketches the life of a mercenary in quick, sinister strokes (“The Striker”). Especially brilliant is “She Loves Only Blue,” a subtly drawn portrait of a woman, her memories and her music. Themes of struggle and mortality color much of the album, along with a hard-won sense of gratitude. “It’s a lucky man who’s got a job to do,” Bell sings in “My Favorite Year” — fortunately for us, he does his job very, very well.