Amber Cross: Savage on the Downhill

Home doesn’t get much downer than on country singer Amber Cross’ Savage on the Downhill . Cross, a Maine-bred backwoods hunter whose tough, flinty voice suggests a church lady gone wrong, compares a beastly romance to a wild boar in the title track. The keening “Lone Freighters Wail” suggests that Cross could be Michael Hurley’s great folk-loner heir, while the love that barely abides amid economic “Storms of Scarcity” comes across like a Kelly Reichardt film. When not hunting wild boar, Cross rehabilitates formerly loved flannel shirts, embroidering them with her lyrics and selling them at shows instead of newly printed merch.