5: Shelby Lynne & Allison Moorer – Not Dark Yet

Separately, sisters Shelby Lynne and Allison Moorer have forged enduring careers in country music— Moorer has released 10 albums, Lynne 15. But they haven’t gotten around to recording together in earnest until now. Their first full-length collaboration is a superb collection of covers that runs the gamut from comfort-zone picks by Merle Haggard and the Louvin Brothers to surprising curveballs by Nick Cave, the Killers, and Nirvana. In a close race, the cover to beat is the Bob Dylan-penned title track. Taken from the 1997 late-career masterpiece Time Out of Mind, Dylan’s hushed ode to creeping mortality is handled with tender loving care by the siblings and an ace backing band that includes Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ keyboardist Benmont Tench. The most unexpected cover, Nirvana’s “Lithium,” is also the one that doesn’t quite work. While Lynne and Moorer get points for thinking outside the box, the comparatively tame country arrangement lacks the grunge trio’s dynamic punch and Kurt Cobain’s singular genius-stoner delivery. The one original song here, “Is It Too Much,” written by Lynne, is a haunting meditation on the weight of pain and loss that is wrested from the gloom by the sisters’ rapturous harmonizing. Here’s hoping for many more collaborations to come.

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