Melissa Etheridge's tired covers album Memphis Rock &Soul
in 2016 suggested she'd run out of songwriting ideas. Three years on, from the
moment the title track opens proceedings with a fearsome blast of percussion, layered
vocals and sizzling guitar reminiscent of Mutt Lange-era Def Leppard, she's
firing on all cylinders again.
She takes on the opioid crisis on “Here Comes The Pain” and
the Parkland shootings on Last Hello, but she gets Personal too, and with /
Know You, on which Beck's father David Campbell arranged the strings, Etheridge
is re-crowned queen of the sapphic ballad. The real gem, though, is the
anti-Trump Shaking. She's sounded angry before, but never like this (although
it is quite like Green Day's American Idiot), and by the end she's reminding
herself how to breathe.
The Medicine Show is her biggest-sounding album this
century. In a reasonable world it will be her biggest-selling album of the
century too.
