Martha Groves Perry - Call Out (2023)

In Call Out, Martha Groves Perry’s third release, her songwriting takes a decidedly bold turn, speaking clearly about hard truths with her characteristic insight and humor. Her lyrics are poetry, evoking strong visual and tactile imagery. Captivating melodic hooks, precise harmonies, and incisive commentary on herself and the world as she sees it combine with fat, intoxicating, badass Americana grooves created in partnership with producer Kenny Schick of Basement 3 Productions in Nashville. Flavors of PJ Harvey, Tom Waits, Tom Petty, and traditional Americana fuse in genre-bending performances, completed by Perry’s expansive and compelling vocal palette that has been compared to Natalie Merchant. Call Out pulls no punches, even in its softer moments, and promises to be an important offering among the music of 2023.

This album is a study in high contrast – dark and light, acceptance and refusal, love and hate, beauty and ugliness, forgiveness and rotting antipathy, rage and joy, acquiescence and calling out. Perry’s response is to speak truth as she understands it, and to acknowledge and affirm the contradictions and their richness. A hallmark of Perry’s songwriting is that even as she weighs in on deep and hard topics, the melody and groove stay magnetic, allowing the listener to experience the satisfying disquiet without spinning out. Perry’s songs communicate the tension between being stuck while freefalling and being drowned in noise while speaking as powerfully as she ever has.

Call Out affirms that the darks are dark, and the light is so very light, but insists that we not make everything gray to make it more comfortable, or make things gray when they are black, or call things gray that are another color altogether. This album gives off heat while churning like an underground river, opening the surface of our experience like a sinkhole to reveal truth.