Album Review // Tyler Childers // Snipe Hunter

RCA

4/5 stars

Tyler Childers has never made the same album twice (unless you count Can I Take My Hounds to Heaven, where he made the same record three times). On Snipe Hunter, he's leaned into that restlessness, blending his patented idiosyncratic storytelling with a more rock-forward approach from start to finish. This might come as little surprise due to the fact that with this record, he's teamed up with legendary producer Rick Rubin. The results are equally ambitious and off-putting, like EDM pulsating through the oft-mentioned holler, or hearing a Hare Krishna chant at a dive bar. The tracks are mostly upbeat in superficial tone, filled with blaring, lush instrumentation. One perplexing outlier is the inclusion of a studio version of "Nose to the Grindstone" (and to a lesser extent "Oneida"). The fan favorite has been available for years in live recordings, but finally gets an honest release here, albeit in the middle of the album. The new material sounds and feels great. It's high-energy, genre-bending alt-country which by all accounts should be a winner. It just seems to lack that all-too-special spark that "Grindstone" had in spades. That urgency, the bare naturalism, the passion and regret just feel like an echo of the past. Snipe Hunter is certainly more memorable than 2023's Rustin In the Rain (aside from "In Your Love" obviously), but it's no Purgatory or Country Squire. Perhaps it's no coincidence that the album's title references a person searching for something that never existed in the first place.