It would seem Kevin Devine had some foresight in the timing of the release of his sixth studio album, Between the Concrete & Clouds, as the record would pair sublimely with an autumn-leaf environed car ride. The album is, for the most part, a straight-ahead, atmospheric and deliberately cool composition that definitely stands out as one of the more relaxed and mood-oriented “Super Tuesday” (the industry term for the slew of albums put out on the second Tuesday of September) releases.

Devine starts in with “Off-Screen,” which is based around a central riff and some pleasantly under-produced percussion, gradually ramping up the energy throughout the tune. He builds the song itself around a I-IV chord progression, which is the basis of a traditional blues progression; we’re reminded from the start that Devine carries with him a great deal of country/western/blues influences, traits of his songs that could last be noted on his She Stayed As Steam EP (see: “Big Bad Man”). These bluesy tenets seem to follow Devine through the record, showing up in the form of clearly purposed old-timey guitar tones and cutesy turnaround licks (see: “Sleepwalking Through My Life”). What becomes immediately noticeable by the end of the first tune is that Devine’s music has gotten bigger in terms of both production and overall sound; this record was his first full-length to be recorded with a backing band, and the production speaks for itself throughout.

Moving through the record, we come to the second track, “The First Hit,” which begins with an astute, pseudo-biblical metaphor and continues with some markedly smart vocal layering, which on this track and on the entire record adds a flashy element to Devine’s at times unremarkable voice. Afterward, we have “Sleepwalking Through My Life,” a simple and sweetly winding waltz that finds KD channeling Hank Williams with some decidedly honky-tonk undertones.

The fourth and fifth tracks on the record, “Awake In the Dirt” and the title track, are two of the more standout tunes on Between the Concrete & Clouds. The former is an unabashed political number, with Devine addressing his father on those terms, integrating his autobiography with Dylan-esque protest. He sings, “Dad I found God // through Vietnam // My Lai’s graves // Agent Orange. // See we live lies // we have to choose. // Our bombs spoke loud // so I spoke, too.” The “dirt,” referenced in the title and throughout the song, is the milieu of the main-street everyman, the so-called proletariat, the politically inept, unaware, Wall-Street-Occupying masses; Devine wants us to know that he prays for them, sleeps in their midst, and shares their glass-ceiling travails. The record’s title track puts forth an equal, if not greater, amount of depth. In a purposeful and excruciatingly autobiographical self-reproach, Devine tells us of his Catholic upbringing, his hot-headed high school adoption of atheism, and his existential crisis at age 25; he even takes a self-deprecating dig at higher education: “And every single time that you opened your mouth // someone else’s lies came tumbling out // parading as the truth in a cap and a gown, // a graduated curse that you cast to the ground.”

After the veritable climax of the record, we come to a slower, softer number—“11-17.” The song starts out in a bedroom-pop-y sort of way, reminding us that KD is definitely a Brooklynite; the drums come in about a third of the way through and perfectly compliment the lush guitar tones by which Devine can be recognized. Moving ahead, we find a possible junk reference in “Wait Out The Wreck” (“Don’t do that shit to myself anymore I keep it away from me // I don’t want to live like I’m dead anymore so keep that away from me”) and more self-deprecation in “A Story, A Sneak” (“thirty years old, what the hell am I doing here?”). These two numbers solidify some of the overall trends on the album—by and large, all of the songs are toe-tapping, head-bobbing, heavily pop-oriented compositions that are calm in mood and spacey in tone.

The ninth track on the record, “The City Has Left You,” is a subtly hilarious soap box rant that seems to rebuke every Williamsburg hipster girl Devine has ever known, with lines like: “Neurotic intellectual, emotionally unavailable // you’re everything you think you should be” and the especially ribbing barb: “You re-record your voicemail, // find that perfect, hollow tone: // ‘Hey, you’ve reached me. // What does that mean? // I’m alone.’” KD’s go at the now-typical irony and played out “finely-tuned delivery” of disenchanted twentysomethings provides a pragmatic grounding point and manages to stand out amongst Devine’s other pieces of lyrical mastery, which number many on the record.

Between the Concrete & Clouds closes out with “I Used To Be Someone,” which builds to an absolutely prodigious climax and ends with pedal effects and a single note on the guitar. The tune brings a close to the story Devine’s written for himself throughout the course of the record; the record itself expounds on Devine’s story as a whole. We see his self-questioning and deprecation, his New York roots, and his philosophical posturing, as well as his relationships with friends, lovers, and family. Establishing and building on that story is what makes for a successful solo artist and, at this point, Kevin Devine is most definitely established. This record is well thought-out and fully developed; although the similarities between many of the songs (straight-ahead feel and tempo, pop-orientation, relaxed mood, the like) both help and hurt it, they fail to drag it down in ahy palpable manner. Already in his early thirties and refusing to still his songwriting talents, Kevin Devine seems like he’s still got a lot more in store for us.

★★★.5/★★★★★

*This review was composed by Paul Adler