Liam Betson – The Cover of Hunter (2014)

Liam Betson jams a lot of words into the first album under his own name and one in particular stands out: “Depression.” It’s a big, sticky noun, clinical, embarrassing to say, let alone sing. But he works it into the penultimate song on The Cover of Hunter, “Made From Tin”, naming the illness the “guts and gore” of an allegorical body that’s also tethered by anxiety and whipped by insecurity.
The song, one of the record’s fastest, fills the space between its shaky guitar strokes with patient breaths of clarinet. At the chorus, Betson borrows the vocal lilt Conor Oberst used on the Bright Eyes deep cut “Amy in the White Coat”.