Fever dream

Lonely landscape through a dusty window

With Ray Wylie Hubbard's latest creation, the South shall surprise again. Due in stores January 25, Delirium Tremolos offers 10 new tracks from a man intent on bringing the soothing sounds of the South to new and old audiences. Upon first listen, the album blurs together like a lonely landscape through the dusty window of a Greyhound bus bound for Pokeytown. Once the album settles into its swamp turtle tempo, eager ears get plenty of entertainment to while away their anonymous journeys. Tracks like "Drivin' Wheel" and "This Mornin' I Am Born Again" elicit the coruscating facets of Hubbard's talent, while the swaying "The Beauty Way" brings the comfort of a front porch swing with soft slide guitars, smoky whispering lyrics, and simple, trotting drums.

The title evokes a curious state of tension or perhaps a foreboding episode of pickled fever dreams, but the album emerges in a clear, pleasant tone. Hubbard spent eight sidewinder years touring across the Lower 48 before he brought his brand of honky-tonk back to the studio in the early 1990s, and these songs hover in a realm somewhere between a heavenly gospel revival and the plodding, toilsome trail of a dust storm refugee.