[Editors Note: With this post Sound on the Sound welcome's our second new writer in a week to the fold. Man-about-Ballard Brady Sprouse offered to commit his opinions on local albums to digital ink for Sound on the Sound, and we graciously accepted. In this first review, he's giving few props to a fellow Ballardian. -josh]

A friend of mine jokingly referred to Zoe Muth and The Lost High Rollers self-titled debut as “the best Emmylou Harris record in the last ten years.” The comparison is easy to make. With a voice as sharp and equally as smooth as Harrisʼ, Muth lets her songwriting style - deftly reinforced by the serious country chops of The Lost High Rollers - create a sound, and record, distinctly her own.

You gotta love that she played some of her earliest gigs at the rough and tumble The Bit Saloon. Among some of the hardest punk and hardcore acts this side of The Funhouse, Zoe was styling her sound with songs like “You Only Believe Me When Iʼm Lying,” full of glossy pedal steel and dusty mountain strings, and “Hey Little Darlinʼ” a swinging folky kind of honky tonk, with equal parts Flying Burrito Brothers and Ira and Charlie Louvin. Together they make a perfect one-two opening to a record that takes you back somewhere in time when country music wasnʼt ruled by pop templates and crossover singles.

Stream: Zoe Muth & the Lost High Rollers - “You Only Believe Me When I’m Lying”
Download it via KEXP’s Song of the Day (August 7, 2009)

As it evolves, the album starts to feel like driving an old pickup somewhere in Montana or the deserts of eastern Washington. The sixth song out of twelve is fittingly called “Middle of Nowhere”, which is how it sounds. A loping mosey of a song, lamenting that being home can be as far away as being lost in the middle of nowhere. “The Running Kind” with itʼs wispy folkiness and delta dobro, and “Hard Luck Love” and itʼs Cajun accordion create a couplet that keeps the listener moving through the lost times, through lost love, and eventually back home again.

The thing I like most about this record is, simply put, it sounds good in a bar. Itʼs the kind of thing you want to hear on a quiet afternoon with a beer and whiskey. Happy or sad, on the road, or two blocks from home.