Current Joys "East My Love"

East My Love, the resplendent, country-tinged 12th album by Current Joys, feels familiar. It’s meant to: the 12 songs contained within dive deep into the rich folklore of the American West to tell time-worn tales of love and trauma, heartbreak and spiritual renewal. Cast with a warm glow and finding Current Joys’ Nick Rattigan tapping into some of his lushest, most high-fidelity production to date, it’s the kind of album that listeners could see themselves within, and, hopefully, keep close when they’re most in need of reassurance or escapism. For Rattigan, though, it’s all that and more.

There’s a purity of catharsis that runs through these songs; written without pretense, they take base human needs and desires and fit them into a grander tradition of American songwriting that takes in everything from Willie Nelson to Bright Eyes. True to that, many of the songs on East My Love, due to their outside-looking-in perspective, play like standards.