Junior Sisk “It’s All Fun and Games” (LP)

Junior Sisk’s new album is It’s All Fun and Games, featuring eleven tracks with Sisk at the helm along with the band. Sisk’s act is a welcome relief in an era peppered with an unholy union of country and pop. There’s something of a return to form with the act, immediately accessible to the widest possible audience, while retaining key musical attributes making up classic form bluegrass. The sound reminded me personally of former trailblazers in the genre, be they Dwight Yoakam with the invention of a sort of punk-rock veneer, coupled with the wholly acoustic, sentimental melancholy of acts like Alison Krauss and Union Station.

URL: https://www.juniorsisk.com/

 Sisk embraces simplicity and originality over slick production design. While the sound sparkles, the album is particularly good to listen to with top form headphones, it feels like storytelling. Sisk has this refreshing honesty with the lyrics of each track, making the listener feel transported to the heart of each theme the tracks communicate. It’s a lost tradition in the fields of popular music, the song as the musical epitome of a yarn, being told round a campfire or grandstanded to a hypothetical, wide-eyed audience.

 Not that bluegrass music necessarily epitomizes all the aforementioned tenets, but it has always been a relic of a time, an art form conjuring a specific image. Sisk is able to master a sound unique to him in this vein, making the listener feel carried flawlessly from track to track, everything harmonious not just musically but thematically. The album’s title compliments this, Sisk wanting to deliver a record capitalizing on quality over quantity, stripping things down to their bare essentials. Mandolins and vocal choruses lead the way, not electronics and dubstep. In some ways the album was a reminder of what I had been missing as a consumer of all things pop culture. It harkened back to my growing up in the nineties, when radio trumped Spotify, and you had access to a curated, diverse portfolio of music that crushed competition not by hooks, but by creativity and class.

 In an interview with Hudson Valley Bluegrass Association, Sisk echoed what I intuited about his musical intentions. The publication described him as “determined to be the anchor of tradition in bluegrass music. Spurning over production in his recordings, to sparse down to the instrument simplicity, his recordings are fresh as if the band were playing in your living room.

 His clean mountain voice rolls easily through a choice of songs you won’t get tired of.” In the actual interview, Sisk highlighted how much previous pioneers of the art form had singular influence over his work to date. “In my opinion today, bluegrass is old country. Country today is…I don’t know what? That’s pretty much the way I think of it. Bluegrass songs today might be old country. That’s my favorite stuff anyway.  Ernest Tubb stuff and way back there. And I think bluegrass songs today are…the real hardcore bluegrass comes from the old country.”

 It’s that respect for elders adding to earnest authenticity in Sisk’s own work. The sense that as much as he is blazing his own trail, there are standards to live up to, shortcuts not to take. That’s not only commendable, but why I feel It’s All Fun and Games proves a worthy successor to the masterworks before it.

 Mark Druery