Sarah Shook & the Disarmers Reclaim a Life Through Memory on Revelations
The North Carolina outfit are at their very best on their fourth album together, as they use bluesy riffs and a windswept pedal steel to create songs that are as terminally modern as they are mythically ageless.
To say that Revelations, the latest record from Sarah Shook & The Disarmers, is a product of survival would be an understatement. Written and recorded in the aftermath of getting sober and receiving a dual diagnosis of ADHD and borderline ASD during the pandemic, Revelations sounds like the kind of album somebody who’s drunk their weight a couple thousand times over and lived to see tomorrow might make. Disarmers bandleader River Shook is many things—nonbinary, atheist, a single parent—and all of that takes a delicate and attentive center-stage on Revelations. With their band—Blake Tallent, Jake Foster, Andrew Lambie and Nick Larimore—they have crafted what is the best record of their career thus far. Revelations is confident and revels in its plainspoken clarity. Musically, it’s an alt-country zenith.
The Disarmers’ last album, 2022’s Nightroamer, was, as Paste critic Annie Parnell aptly put it, a “sprawling reckoning” staring deep into the void of “a deep-seated faith.” This time around, Revelations finds Shook and their bandmates tightening up and performing instinctive solos with a flourishing, raw-hemmed edge—all while restoring a life through memory in the present. It’s not a leveling out, it’s a level up for the North Carolinians. With the title-track breaking the whole record open, the band stares down the barrel of hard-won truths and time-worn circumstances. “Revelations” could be about exhaustion or societal expectations, but the clearest read is that it’s a song about the intersection of religion and mental illness and how both of those ropes tug at the philosophies of birthright. “I been in the state that I’m in since the day of my birth,” River sings, against a potent bevy of bluesy guitar, heavy toms and bass. “New beginnin’s, I’m done listenin’ when the old guard tells me what my word is worth. Hey, baby, I’m barely gettin’ through each day.”
In a recent New York Times profile, River spoke about their life after moving to North Carolina from Western New York with their family as a teenager. “I went from 0 to 100, from having been kissed once to having sex to having a threesome the next night,” they said. “And then I married a guy I met on MySpace three weeks later and got pregnant two months later. Upending everything my parents held dear was an act of self-preservation, because their belief system taught me I could not be myself.” Across Revelations, River is meticulous in what stories they give us. “Dogbane” rears its head vibrantly, as they deliver a pastoral of lucidity, admonishing a life spent on your knees and questioning if there’s a difference between flowers and the weeds around them. “Well it’s lookin’ like the end of days / If it ain’t underwater, it’s ablaze / And we got hope and heartache in each gaze,” River bemoans in a warble that scratches at a yodel, trading guitar riffs with Tallent and tracing the fireworks of Larimore’s pedal steel.
On “Backsliders,” River pays tribute to their fellow wrong-turners with a generous love song glazed with retrospect. “Now I got one foot out the door and you’re still gettin’ dressed,” they sing. “Hate I can’t say no as easily as you say yes, I’m a real piece of shit and you’re a vixen in a dress.” The track is queer as all get-out, told empathetically from the perspective of someone who’s hurdled enough roadblocks in their life to sing with such bare-chested vulnerability. Larimore’s pedal steel is again a highlight here, but this time paired with Tallent’s acoustic guitar chugging along to River’s vocal phrasings.