The Year in Music #8: The Lone Bellow

The Lone Bellow's modern take on Americana—or "Brooklyn country music," as the band likes to call it, even if they're all transplanted southerners—delivers the year's highest ranking debut album.

Ever since alt-country's heyday in the late '90s (OK, maybe for me it lasted until the early '00s), I've found it takes something really special from the genre to make a big enough impact on me. 

Needless to say, this is a pretty special album. Most of the songs were written while lead singer Zach Williams' wife was recovering from a car accident that left her paralyzed from the neck down. 

Perhaps that explains songs with titles such as "Two Sides of Lonely," "You Never Need Nobody" and "You Can Be All Kinds of Emotional." But, one of my personal favorites, "Bleeding Out," seems to be more about making it in the big city. Even still, there's at least a hint of the pain and hope for redemption that define the rest of the album.