Ray Wylie Hubbard’s latest album is alive.
While the Texas music icon says it may be his last, throughout Reel 2 Reel 4 Real, chords shift and reshape, like restless muscles; rhythms snap, like bones into place; steel slithers and slinks, something awakening, yawning, stretching under the meat of his grizzled Americana.
Tracked directly to analog tape, Hubbard’s 20th album pulses with the weight and wear of the last 50 years. It is rawboned — stripped bare by the artist’s often serrated outlaw country — but set alight with the sizzles, pops, and skips of something tangible taking shape. So stark and absolute, it’s as if one can take a bite out of the syrup and sinew of the shadowy “El Diablo Esta Ganando” or reach out and grab ahold of the resonator-drenched “A Murder of Crows.”
