Review- Adeem the Artist: Anniversary
Anniversary, the new release from Adeem the Artist, opens with a fanfare of crashing cymbals. It seems an appropriate start to an album that announces Adeem’s arrival on what should be a much bigger stage.
Photo by Hannah Bingham
Already one of country music’s best songwriters, Adeem takes another leap forward with this latest release. Anniversary presents a dozen slices of life with Adeem’s trademark wit and intelligence, bolstered with a bigger sound aided by big-time producer Butch Walker (Green Day, Pink, Weezer and somebody named Taylor Swift) and a somewhat larger crowdfunded budget.
Always ambitious lyrically, Adeem brings a newfound musical grandeur on Anniversary. That opening fanfare leads into the cinematic “There We Are,” which sounds like the soundtrack from a sweeping epic of a movie.
Woozy, boozy horns carry “Socialite Blues,” a jazzy blues tale that finds a perhaps overconfident narrator wooing a date with Etta Baker records found at a yard sale so Adeem can “sit here till the break of dawn making out-of-tune songs with you.”
“Plot of Land” is a blistering garage rocker that finds Adeem imagining an escape from America’s exploitive capitalism on a homestead where “We’ll plant pecan trees up and down the drive / And sugar ‘em up come winter time / Make cakes for dates with friends when they pull through / We’re gonna finally get planted and grow on this planet too.” It’s such a joyous song musically. Adeem speaks for us all when they yell, “What about that band?!” halfway through, leading into a glorious 90 second guitar solo.
Adeem shines brightest as a lyricist and a storyteller.
“Part & Parcel” relaxes as it presents glimpses of a life and a working class love story: working on the dock, playing songs at night, going to the store, sleeping late, meeting a girl... Nothing remarkable about any of that, except life is remarkable. The vignettes are scattered as life is random, until we weave them later into a narrative whole. “And the timelines interweave / Creating patterns that I trace, and fall asleep underneath a magnolia tree.”
“Rotations” – man, it’s such a sweet, tender ode to a child. Adeem watches Isley Dale play with “fists of dandelion, mixing potions up in Mason jars with mint and wild violet / Were that I could trap that laughter in a vial around my neck / Save it for the hard times so that I could open it.”
Childhood goes so fast. “How many rotations am I gonna get with you? / To share with you the wisdom & magic spells I have accrued?... When I’m gone, you’ll carry on & carry all that there is left of me with you.” Welp, I got kids, and I’m tearing up.
“Wounded Astronaut” finds Adeem ruminating over a lifetime of relationships ruined by poor behavior. “I’ve got a highlight reel of all the times / I made somebody cry / As a selfish, reckless, less invested friend than what I came by.”
That’s something we can all feel, if we’re being honest. And this line – “I was insensitive and hypersensitive / A duality not lost on me” – well, that one hit me right in the feels. That feeling being regret, to be precise.
Adeem is a white southerner playing country music, a hunter, Christian and self-proclaimed redneck. Adeem is also nonbinary, pansexual and sometimes wears nail polish, lipstick and dresses.
All that might make Adeem a unicorn, one-of-a-kind. That might make their work off-putting – those songs aren’t about me. The gift of Adeem, though, is that their music finds the universal. We’re all in this together, and let’s figure out a way to make this work.
Anniversary is in many ways a classic country record. In fact, “One Night Stand” is, as Adeem says, a “90s country pop bop.” There’s a meet-cute in a bar, an attraction, flirting and sparks a-flying. The narrator wants a relationship, the object of affection wants the titular one-night stand. The twist: the genders don’t match the boy-girl of those country bops playing in the 90s. Love is love, and love is good.
Anniversary hit the stands and streamers May 3 on Thirty Tigers and Adeem’s Four Quarters Records.
Find out more about Adeem the Artist at these links (a social media follow is highly recommended – you’ll get regular doses of thoughtful commentary, shitposting and hilarity):
