Weaver has spent years accumulating the sort of pedigree that could easily calcify into self-satisfaction — collaborations with John Jennings, the two-time GRAMMY-winning duo Cathy Fink and Marcy Marxer, and the songwriter Louisa Branscomb among them. Instead, that experience seems to have sharpened rather than softened him. This EP finds a man closer in spirit to the old union-hall balladeers than to anything polished for radio: Guthrie's clarity, Seeger's conviction, Dylan's willingness to let a melody carry a grievance without apologising for it.

The record opens its account with "Everything That Jesus Wouldn't Do," a wry, unsparing dissection of borrowed piety, and never really lets its guard down from there. "Fight the Fascists" arrives as the record's raw nerve — a snarling, three-chord broadside that Weaver himself calls the only punk song he's ever written, and it earns the label. It's blunt where blunt is required, all clenched jaw and open contempt, and it's better for refusing nuance it hasn't been offered by the events that inspired it.

Elsewhere the record trades outrage for something closer to grief and stubborn tenderness. "Thoughts and Prayers" is the EP's most devastating moment, a song assembled from the wreckage of Las Vegas, Charleston and Sandy Hook, sung with a weariness that lands harder than any shout could. "I Don't Want Your Billions, Mister" resurrects the melody of the old Almanac Singers protest number and repurposes it for a century that apparently still needs the reminder, adjusting the arithmetic of greed for inflation with a dry wit that keeps the song from tipping into sermon. "I Still Have Hope," meanwhile, is the record's beating heart: written in the fog of 2020, it clings to a fragile optimism the way a hand clings to a rail on a rocking train.

Musically, this is Americana built with craftsmanship rather than affectation. Dobro, pedal steel, banjo and mandolin weave around Weaver's plainspoken voice, and the small choir that turns up here and there lends the record a congregational weight, as though these songs were written to be sung back rather than merely listened to. Recorded at "The Bar" in Gaithersburg under Jim Robeson and mastered in Nashville, the production is warm and unfussy, giving the songs room to breathe without ever losing their edge.

What lifts *Songs of Hope and Resistance* above simple polemic is Weaver's refusal to let anger curdle into cynicism. Beth Nielsen Chapman's assessment — that the music finds its way through the noise and back to grace — captures something true about the record's arc. It rages, certainly, but it never forgets to comfort. Cathy Fink's verdict, that Weaver is keeping alive music's oldest job of confronting injustice, rings equally accurate.

This is a record built for the moment it was written in and stubborn enough to outlast it. Weaver has made something that argues, mourns and, against considerable odds, still hopes.