There are two kinds of Sadies on Northern Passages—one group making spacey, airy country/folk rock that sounds like it could’ve been pulled from the soundtrack to Zabriskie Point, and another plugging in their cords and turning the volume and fuzzboxes up to 11. This is a compliment. Since 1998, the Sadies have been one of the most quietly impressive outfits in cross-genre guitar-based roots music, touching on country, folk, rock and other traditions as desired. Northern Passages finds brothers Dallas and Travis Good taking the group through a collection of songs split evenly between the sweet and the salty (and some with elements of both; see brief, hilariously warped country-western set piece “God Bless The Infidels”). As always, the record features banks of reverb-and-tremolo-soaked guitars, the band’s stock in trade—and a fitting one, given how much of the music deals with loss and wistful regret—but the peculiar genius of the Sadies is to find new variations on a sonic model that, by this point, no other band is working with quite as much earned confidence.
—Eric Waggoner
