Sound Advice: Country Club by John Doe and The Sadies

Every Tuesday, Torontoist scours record store shelves in search of the city’s most notable new releases and brings you the best—or sometimes just the biggest—of what we’ve heard in Sound Advice.

After releasing albums with other seminal punk/folk/blues artists such as Andre Williams (1999) and Jon Langford (2003), Toronto favourites The Sadies bring us their latest collaboration, out today on Outside Music, this time with tenacious musician and actor John Doe. Founder and frontman of the once-quintessential Los Angeles punk band X, it wasn't until Doe's solo 1990 debut, Meet John Doe, that he fully embraced the country direction X started taking in the late 1980s. He fits in just perfectly at the Sadies's Country Club.

Recorded at Blue Rodeo's local Woodshed Studio, Country Club could easily get slapped with the alt-country label, but that might be a little too easy; sounding more Nashville than neo-folk, Doe joins the Sadies for a nostalgic fifteen tracks, ranging from covers of country classics to chameleonic originals. These songs, like most classic (or classic-influenced) country, moan and ache, but all of that is somewhat obscured by the celebratory vibe (and by the “don't feel sorry for me, it's just the way it is" attitude of classic country) formed by the artists' mutual reverence. Doe gets reacquainted with once-tourmate Kathleen Edwards; her lived-in voice has always told a million stories of its own, and here she provides the perfect accompaniment to Doe's veteran vox and the Sadies's best roots-riffing on Merle Haggard's "Are the Good Times Really Over for Good."

On Country Club, what's old isn't entirely new, and even the new doesn't sound entirely so, but it sounds good, and roots fans of all persuasions will be hard-pressed to disagree. It's an easy, warm listen, here just in time for the season(s) of spending all your free time outdoors, coveting the sun and the heat, and the seemingly slowed pace all of those things bring. Country Club will keep you company on a bright weekend afternoon at home, or on your sudden urge to get in the car and head south. Next stop, Memphis.