A New Testament

Christopher Owens grew up in the Children of God, where, by his account, the music was three chords and a simple melody, steeped in country. After leaving as a teenager he spent years in Amarillo, Texas, hearing Willie Nelson and AM radio. A New Testament, his second solo album, released by Turnstile at the end of September 2014, goes back to that music on purpose, and its title is a joke with a point. “Every new album is a new testament,” he said, and he is, he told Drowned in Sound, “a very firm atheist”.

Owens keeps a dated list of every song he considers a keeper, 153 by mid-2014, and colour-codes it by genre. In the 2013 sessions he picked from it, so some are old: “Overcoming Me” dates from January 3, 2008, and “Oh My Love” was played live in 2010. Doug Boehm, who produced Father, Son, Holy Ghost for Girls and then Lysandre, co-produced and mixed it with him. Most of the band played on Father, Son, Holy Ghost: John Anderson on lead guitar, Darren Weiss on drums, Danny Eisenberg on keyboards and Makeda Francisco among the backing singers. David Sutton, from the Lysandre sessions, plays bass, and Eddie Efira, new to Owens, plays pedal steel. They all stand around him on the cover, where he wears a pink cowboy hat. “Going solo for me has not meant working solo,” he said.

“My Troubled Heart” sets the terms. It is built on “Early in the Morning”, the Peter, Paul and Mary song, with the faith taken out: “I ain’t got no god to whom I pray.” Owens put it first, he said, to make clear “this is not a religious record”. “Stephen” is the centre of the album. It is named for his brother, who died of pneumonia at two, a few months before Owens was born, after the group would not seek medical care for him; their father left soon afterwards. Owens sets it as a hymn, with piano and choir, around one line: “all that we wanted was our father’s love.” His father, a country singer in Louisville, called after hearing it to ask if his son was angry with him. Owens told him he wasn’t.

“It Comes Back to You”, the first song he shared, in March 2014, ends with Francisco’s voice. Its refrain, “You’ve got to give your love away / It comes back to you”, is gospel with no god in it. The ring in “Oh My Love” that she never wore was real, a small white one with two hearts from an antique shop, and she never told her parents about him either. The videos play up the cowboy look. Max Minghella filmed “Nothing More Than Everything to Me” at a school dance full of children, and Owens noted that at their age he was made to memorise scripture. Aaron Brown, who made the first Girls videos, shot “Never Wanna See That Look Again” to Owens’s plan, down to a knife throw and a flung cowboy hat.

Critics mostly landed in the middle, and Metacritic averaged 61 from 20 reviews. Pitchfork gave it 6.7 and found it too neat, to the point of coldness, though “Stephen” rose above the rest. The Guardian, at 3 out of 5, found the setting conservative but Owens honest and uncompromising. NME gave it 6 out of 10, calling parts of it cheesy and retro while praising “It Comes Back to You”, “Overcoming Me” and “Stephen”. AllMusic gave it 2.5 out of 5. Consequence of Sound was warmer, calling it “a big, warm hug of an album” and “Oh My Love” one of his best songs.

The tidiness that bothered critics is the brief he set himself, “three chords and the truth”, and the record keeps to it: twelve songs in 33 and a half minutes, only two of them past four. The borrowed forms are what make the personal songs land. “Stephen” borrows the sound of the church to say what the church cost his family, and “My Troubled Heart” turns a religious song into a statement of disbelief in its opening lines. Not every pastiche earns its place, and “Key to My Heart” is as cheesy as NME said. But the best songs here rank with his best since Girls. At Outside Lands in San Francisco that August, a big hometown show he played sober, he ended the set with “Stephen” and then “Nothing More Than Everything to Me”.