Famous Anonymous Wilderness

Like Richard Buckner, Gillian Welch, and Uncle Tupelo before him, Graham Lindsey is one in a specialized line of young artists who has debuted with fully formed rustic sensibilities intact. He taps into ancient folk, early Bob Dylan, and alt-country with ease, but delivers his muse with a fiery spirit that belies his onetime membership in kiddie punk band Old Skull. Famous Anonymous Wilderness is an astounding debut that has generated a bunch of critical excitement in the brainier music magazines and newspapers, and one has to wonder where an artist like this comes from — especially when it's seemingly out of nowhere. In Lindsey's case, the songs were hashed out in self-imposed isolation in a Nebraska farmhouse. (By the time of release, he had taken up residency in a log cabin in his native Wisconsin.) Lindsey throws down the gauntlet with the brash folk of "Hutch Jack Flats Rag," an impassioned self-examination that'll incite a slew of Dylan comparisons. Other highlights include the primeval, soul-shaking murder ballad "Emma Rumble" and the gorgeously country-tinged "I Won't Let You Down." There's a whole lot here that places Lindsey on higher terrain than most of his singer/songwriter peers, but perhaps most striking are the lyrics. Not too many artists have the poetical chops to end an album with such a striking sentiment as "I'm useless to the wild earth, so sings the bowels of every place/I used to map the laughter, though I could never find its face/And anywhere that I may go my judgment roars its restless bells/I never knew and shall never know a worse place than myself." And Lindsey's is a muse that sticks with you long after those final words are left ringing in your ears.