Jason Isbell’s “24 Frames”, Off His Upcoming Album “Something More Than Free” Reviewed (Stream It Here)

24 frames per second is the speed that motion picture cameras capture images, and it is the image Jason Isbell has chosen for yet another slice of Southern life, it is almost like a memory, like an image of a family caught in the back of Jason Isbell’s mind, a father like a pipe bomb ready to blow, is affecting his relationship with a woman, and, maybe just because it is the distance between the lyric and the images it describes, it also works for the second person singular lyric. In other words: the first song we’ve heard off Jason Isbell’s eagerly anticipated follow up to Southeastern, Something More Than Freedom, a sound he has called Lynyrd Cohen, is a typical Isbell track, a continuum from “Outfit”, dragging its lives as lived, Chekhovian storytelling of Southern strife.

After a dodgy 2015 (one lousy song, two bad covers), only righted recently with the Amanda Shires gigs and the appearance on the Letterman Show, and with his upcoming fatherhood certainly among the things he is dealing with, you might want to give Jason Isbell some slack. But he doesn’t need any. Not only is this one of his most beautiful songs, the equal of anything on his breakthrough album, it is also yet another great -I mean, the best around right this second, lyric: it connects a woman’s love and breakdown with his father’s equal craziness. It is a real  and beautiful connection, and the image of it suggest something that has already passed: it is like a refraction of a very serious concern.

The band is the 400 unit, and yes, it is a mid tempo rocker, more classicist than country rock: though he has been name checking Lynyrd Skynyrd, this is  more like prime Drive By Truckers. Not quite as good as the Truckers, it could use a touch more muscle, though that is really whining because it is truly a great song; a heartbreaker but how and why are question marks: “‘All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’ to mix my Russian authors, Isbell equates a man’s  explosive father with his dissolving girlfriend and sees it all from a  distance, even the man himself: “this is how you see yourself floating on the ceiling”, Jason sings, with a voice all undertow and deep feelings, and that’s the most telling line because it goes straight back to the camera. It makes sense of the lyric.

“24 Frames” is a think of extreme beauty, it is a gorgeous clicked in jigsaw puzzle about how one relationship is mirrored in a later one, both major, both central for the man Jason is singing to, watching the girl is like watching his father in a movie: they are doing the same destructive things.Isbell (last writer, mostly because the story has ended) is William Faulkner as a pop star.

Grade: A