After a little over a decade, Alex Winston returns with a new LP, and somehow whoever was squatting this domain name forgot to renew it this year, so I’ve returned as well. Welcome back to ſtaires! I have no idea how you ended up back here, but it’s a pleasure to see you.

Alex Winston’s King Con is one of my most favorite albums. It’s the kind of album that I listen to a few times a year ever since I first heard it many years ago, and I never skip the songs when they come up in my shuffle. The songs are basically in my blood, a core part of my identity, which is weird, since the best songs are about sexually groping a portrait of Elvis and the experience of being a sister wife, eager to come out as top waifu.

Her new album, Bingo!, is much less quirky, both lyrically and musically. King Con was clearly infected by the late 2000’s quirky instrumentation pastiche, dialed up to eleven, in a way that makes me assume that some sort of mad genius producer was behind it. Bingo, on the other hand, is fairly straight forward, with occasional flirts with strangeness. Don’t get me wrong, a very talented producer is at the helm of this album, but I think the album is lacking in character. I’ve picked “Swampland” to feature, the third track off the album, because it is one of two songs that I think still contain some of that quirkiness that made King Con so memorable. (“Run On” is the other.)

Unfortunately, it seems like Alex Winston has had a rough decade. In interviews, and in the songs, she paints a portrait of a woman somewhat lost in Southern-themed dive bars, bouncing between disaffected men and sometimes being left behind by them. The songs can end up feeling a bit navel-gazing, a bit sad-sack, and I’m not really here for those songs.

But quirky narcissist anthem “Special Feeling”, and the two main lead singles, “Hot One” (which is made to be a crowd pleaser with plenty of inserts for state and city names) and “Where My Cowboys At?”, are pretty damn good and the combination of those three songs, plus the two extra quirky ones, makes it easier to look past the couple of dreary tracks.

I hope it’s not another decade before we get a third album. And I hope that Winston faces better days ahead, so that the next album feels more like a suitable follow up to King Con’s celebration of strangeness, and less like an exhausted sigh at the end of a rough night. (It would also be fun if her unreleased pop album–the real second LP–showed up somehow, too, but I don’t want to be greedy, or open up old wounds.)