What the Hell Was I Thinking

Hasil Adkins was a natural fit for the Mississippi-based label Fat Possum, which was founded in the '90s to record crotchety musicians from the South, each of whom just happened to have incredibly singular talents. What the West Virginia–born Adkins had in common with Fat Possum stalwarts like R.L. Burnside and T-Model Ford was that they all played a form of dance music. Not dance music in the modern mainstream sense, but dance music that grew out of rent parties thrown in backwoods towns where electricity wasn't guaranteed. The spiky rhythms of “Stay with Me,” “No Shoes," and “Gone Gone Gone” could be Motown songs for hillbillies. Hasil also takes a stab at a brilliantly muddy piece of slide guitar work called “Talkin’ to My Lord.” Still, the best performances are his ballads. At every session, Haze threw in a tenderhearted country song, but “Your Memories” and “Somehow You’ll Find Your Way” are particularly touching. They're upstaged only by the final showstopper, “Up on Mars”; it's a surreally atonal masterpiece that has Adkins speaking in tongues and dreaming of distant worlds.