Gurf Morlix – Cut’n Shoot

He’s got a name straight out of a Superman comic, but Gurf Morlix keeps it close to the ground. The multi-instrumentalist and songwriter—best known for his association with Lucinda Williams (including an earlier version of Car Wheels on a Gravel Road she rejected, estranging the longtime collaborator)—is equally at home with blues, folk and country, emphasizing the latter in its purest form on this, his third, album. Playing all the instruments other than drums (handled by Georgia Satellites alumnus Rick Richards), Morlix honors the idiom’s formal conventions—from tight rhymes and symmetrical wordplay to sorrowful pedal steel and walking bass—with impressive precision and feel. The old-time country song’s form is as rigorous as the Elizabethan sonnet, and the Austin-based artist observes every nuance on such finely cut gems as “Yesterday She Didn’t” (“But today she does”), “Were You Lyin’ Down” (“When you stood me up / Did you leave your lipstick on his coffee cup?”) and (“Got half a mind to tell”) “The Whole Truth” (“Got twice the right to tell it all”). He delivers his lines with a mixture of reserve and wryness that Lucinda fans will find familiar, demonstrating he has as much of a claim to the approach as she does. Cut ’n Shoot is stone country at its most cerebral.