Artist:     Kari Arnett

Album:     When the Dust Settles

Label:     Self-released

Release Date:     2.8.2019

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When the Dust Settles is the debut full-length album from Minneapolis-based singer-songwriter Kari Arnett. While Arnett offers mellow, gentle, country-inflected tunes, she is the essence of the Americana genre. Hers are lonesome, often melancholy melodies leaning more toward folk but given a whispering country feel with instrumentation that includes fiddle and pedal steel. She comes across honestly and authentically with a sense of confidence that belies a debut. The music is comfortably warm and often the lyrics are anything but. Her themes are the usual ones: love, heartbreak, and heartland struggle of daily life. Many are personal, but songs like “Blood and Bones,” “This American Life” and “Tired of This Town” are pitched as referendums on the state of the country and its eroding values.

Influenced by the work of Lori McKenna, Patty Griffin, and Caroline Spence, and evoking the style of Caitlin Canty, she partnered with producer/engineer, Danny O’Brien (Hot Dad Labs: Minneapolis, MN) along with her full band. As Arnett strums her acoustic guitar, she is accompanied by a six-piece band of Minneapolis-based musicians, including Ben Cook-Feltz on keys. It’s a blend of acoustic and electric, that stays in support of the song, moving from ethereal to sweeping cinematic backdrops that linger like a mist around her mostly tender vocals—though she can wail too, as evidenced in the opener “Dark Water” and others. What separates Arnett from the female counterparts mentioned is her use of space. In some ways, it’s similar to other albums made in the upper Midwest with its prairie-like feel such as Jeffrey Foucault’s Salt As Wolves.

At times Arnett sounds bitter, broken and defeated, but somehow strands of resilience and fond memories emerge. Often the tunes seem autobiographical but others like “Blood and Bones” decry gun violence, or diminished hopes as in “This American Life”: “The hustler and the cheater, the gambler and the dealer on the sidelines trying to nickel and dime, stealing all your time. You worked hard all your life, got a brand new ride but you’re in the back seat, can’t control your destiny, stuck in the irony.”

She does a nice job of integrating cliché phrases into her songs, none better than this from “Breaking Is Easy”: “There will always be one for the money, two for the show/Don’t you give up now, you gotta long way to go/Cut your teeth on the truth and it left a scar/Breaking is easy, holdin’ on is hard.”

There’s both a longing to escape and a desire to reboot. Lines from “Starting Over” could serve as one of thematic currents running through these songs: “I wanna go somewhere no one knows my name/I wanna head on down the road, get lost and ride the wind/a change is gonna come as fast as the west bound train/Waiting for new life to begin, so I’m starting all over again.” She expresses similar sentiments in the title track.

Disgust with small town life colors “Tired of This Town” but defiance emerges in the feminist outcry in the bluesy “Only a Woman.” Fragility and vulnerability mark “The War” but she ends with fond remembrance in “When You Were Mine.” Kari Arnett’s music comes across calmly and beautifully but beneath lies a tortured soul who delivers universally experiential sentiments.

—Jim Hynes