"Still Life, her third LP (and first for the venerable indie label Merge Records) takes her gifts and moves them into a different direction without blunting the qualities that made her memorable. While country influences are still audible in these songs, here she embraces roots rock, blues, indie rock, '70s folk rock, and idiosyncratic pop in her melodies as well as her arrangements, and allows scrappy electric guitars to take center stage on several tunes ... The energy in her performances on "Someone Else" and the title track sounds gloriously liberating; she's clearly having fun taking her music to new places and the performances are full of the joy of discovery ... All the gifts that made Carson McHone an artist to watch when she first emerged from the Texas singer/songwriter arena are present and accounted for on Still Life, but she's added new ideas that make this music feel like a metamorphosis; transforming herself into an artist who has thrown off any generic frameworks that confined her in the past".