Blu Sanders / Shore Fire Media / Submitted photoAngaleena Presley, member of the platinum-selling band Pistol Annies, recently released her first solo album.

“AMERICAN MIDDLE CLASS”

Slate Creek Records

As one-third of the high-test country sisterhood Pistol Annies, Angaleena Presley has honed a reputation for straight talk and sass, putting fresh spin on a formalist mode. Her fellow Annies, Miranda Lambert and Ashley Monroe, are well ahead of her in the solo-career department, but Presley, 38, seems to have taken her time for a reason. “American Middle Class,” her debut album, comes fully formed, clear about its purpose.

You could call it a concept album, insofar as its 12 songs — all Presley’s, almost half bearing a sole songwriting credit — adhere to the same subject area of hard times and short horizons, of scraping and striving and coming up short. “You sure ain’t rich, and you sure as hell/ Ain’t poor enough to get one little break,” Presley belts on the title track, a tribute to her upbringing as a Kentucky coal miner’s daughter.

She sings wryly of a community’s response to prescription drug abuse (“Pain Pills”) and the related scourge of small-town boredom (“Dry County Blues”), under the musical cover of country traditionalism. On “Grocery Store,” she plays out hypotheticals in her mind, making a watchful sport out of empathy. These are sturdy, insightful songs, and Presley, who produced the album with Jordan Powell, presents them well.

She’s a warm, agreeable singer, with neither the flint nor the sheen of a more dynamic peer like Lambert. That limits the size of her audience, but it’s not a problem within the self-contained world of the album.

What is a problem are the handful of songs that recall other, stronger efforts: “Knocked Up,” with a premise recently tackled by both Lambert and Monroe; “Drunk,” which evokes “Hungover,” by another Nashville contemporary, Brandy Clark; “Surrender,” a ballad written with Luke Laird and Barry Dean, better suited to an upstart like Cassadee Pope. But for now, at least, Presley has her identity locked tight.

— Nate Chinen,

The New York Times