It’s been too long since we’ve heard from Elizabeth Cook. Now, six years after her last album, 2020’s Aftermath, she returns with her eighth studio album, Great Television, and it’s a welcome gift. The album appears at the same time as her film The Easy Kind — which traces her artistic journey from her early days of singing with her parents’ band — is showing in theaters. Both the album and the film capture the life and music of an artist whose vision is to tell her own story and the stories of those around her without adornment, speaking as plainly as possible and with emotional depth about loss, longing, hope, and love.
Shawn Hampton, Chelle Rose, and Ashley Monroe speak the soundbites that open “Sunset Promenade,” a rock and roll waltz from which the album takes its title: “Turns out hurricanes are great television/ Turns out all the things in my head are a prison/ And I just want a friend I can stand and do my time with.” The song unfolds gently before swelling into an atmospheric river of sound, with Monroe’s and Trevor Bahnson’s towering harmonies and spiraling chamber rock. The cinematic “Girls of Atomic City” celebrates the women who worked at Oak Ridge on the Manhattan Project and the relative freedom they experienced (“She’s got everything anybody’d wanna hold on to”).
