Spectreview: al Riggs and Lauren Francis – Bile and Bone

Released: October 7, 2020

Country/Folk
(Alternative)
(Singer-Songwriter)

-MAGENTA-

“I should not be in a place
Where I am on my knees each night
Praying for my leaders to be
Shot down on sight”

Almost every record is made with as much love as possible, but some wear that heart more on the sleeve. Bile and Bone, of the prolific al Riggs, is one of those records. Glacially paced and tender at its core, al Riggs’ collaboration with Lauren Francis infuses dusty country rock with a twinkling incandescence. It’s simply one of the most quietly-gorgeous releases of this year. Sonically, that’s mostly Francis’ doing, along with producer Alli Rogers, who helped engineer Bon Iver’s recent i,i. Together with Riggs’, they forge a gentle current of guitars and keyboards, texture and color, that’s bracing at times (like the heart-cutting strums of “Livalon”) and hearth-like at others (the warm cocoons of “Apex Twin” and “Boyfriend Jacket, Boyfriend Sweater”).

Riggs’ natural charisma, however, remains at the forefront, their voice both starkly conversational and exquisitely uneven. Like that of many accomplished country artists, it skips across any given melody like a stone on a river, never quite right on pitch but always emotionally on the mark. Riggs writes queer-centered, quietly sad songs that don’t so much overwhelm as settle into the brain, and their writing here is just as impressionistic as their previous projects, if not more so. The waltzing title track solemnly laments the persistence of intranational hatred; the pawnshop blues of “Love is an Old Bullet” beats with a crushingly-lovelorn heart; “Livalon” radiates beauty against paradoxically-fatalist questioning. Cumulatively, Bile and Bone is transportive: a freeze frame of a solitary drunken night, portraits of streetlamps and dark bedrooms, fantasy adjacent to cold cruel reality.

Recommended for things that bump in the night.