Photo by Catalyst Design Photography
Review: The Lone Canary delivers one of 2025’s best albums, ‘Dime Store Horses’
The folk/Americana duo unleashes one of the year’s most evocative records.
The Lone Canary‘s Dime Store Horses arrives soon like a pair of well-worn cowboy boots. The stitchwork on the side frays and fades, giving a tattered, rustic quality. The duo’s third full-length album finds the singers, songwriters, and musicians Jesse Fox and Heather Camacho converging on 10 songs that are steeped in booze-soaked, midnight reverie. Their voices tangle together, vining up pastoral paintings that capture the beauty of living, loving, and dying. “We’re cutting our teeth on the bones of a past of heretical wrongs,” sings Fox on the deeply piercing cut “Sins of Our Fathers.” Their thorny, blood-curdling lyrics piece together like a jigsaw puzzle.
Their brutal honesty, not only present on dusty, acoustic-wrought arrangements, punishes the listener’s skull. The dents made on your psyche leave your body thrashing, wallowing in the mud and rain. “I’m lying on a silent bed next to you,” the duo croons with “Carry On,” a hollow, delicate, and incisive moment that severs the heartstrings. Their throbbing aching needles throughout the rest of the album, from the mournful “Wildfire” to the crackling embers of “Give It Some Time,” as well as the prickly, guitar-bound “Something Real.” “It’s the urge to feel, grasping for something real,” crows Fox, with Camacho echoing in the background, on the latter. “Take me to a time where our hearts are on the line.”
Dime Store Horses delivers its threadbare messaging with a world-weary angst. The instruments always serve the songs, puncturing the air from your lungs, and never feel overwrought or underbaked. Everything is just right. Straining elements from the works of Gillian Welch and The Civil Wars, the record pings like translucent, splintering layers that you’re left to peel back. There’s a fragility to the production that drills down to the bone marrow — lingering in limbo until the skeleton bursts open. With the finale and titular cut, the duo cries, “We’re going nowhere fast.” That refrain wafts up from the steaming sidewalk after a mid-summer downpour, their voices floating up like sparking, crystalline orbs. The record leaves an indelible scar on your mind, as the melodies lodge between your ears.
The Lone Canary’s Dime Store Horses arrives everywhere on September 12.
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