Cosmic American Music is the debut of Tabasco Birds, an eight-piece from North Texas. Six of the eight members attended Dallas Art High School, and all are now students at the University of North Texas. They say that they “channel the Cosmic American sound of Gram Parsons”, and you can see what they mean, but actually their music is livelier, more varied and rougher around the edges than Parsons’. This is a good thing, as the contributions from the eight members on different instruments mean that there is originality and freshness to their work.
They are closer to the rural, almost hillbilly country of Noahjohn. As you listen, you can imagine the songs being played to an appreciative audience, having great fun dancing in a barn…
Category: alt-country
Souled American return after thirty years with a work of immediate relevance. Arriving just in time, with decency roundly mocked, as dissent spells career disaster and algorithms isolate us into units of convenience, Sanctions dares explore roots and traditions in both sound and consequence, revealing a band that has lost members but gained gravity. Acclaimed by Jeff Tweedy, The Jayhawks, John Darnielle, and Counting Crows, Souled American here elevate their unique style of ambient Americana into a life-altering experience full of feeling and drama, like some ink-stamped elegy fresh off the printing presses of Walt Whitman. Written, performed, and produced by founding members Joe Adducci and Chris Grigoroff, the album marks…
Although Brown Horse are soaked up to their collective armpits in various signifiers of a very recognisably American musical lexicon (pedal steels and the lure of the road leading out of town feature prominently here), the Norwich quartet (accompanied by drummer Ben Rodwell and backing singer Neve Cariad) achieve an identifiably British take on various alt. country/Americana staples on the startlingly assured, often viscerally raw Total Dive.
With all four members sharing the songwriting duties equally, the ten songs on Total Dive venture from grizzled, petrol-fumed bar room boogie (the title track, with the track’s energised gallop deliciously at odds with the downbeat dead-end vibes of the lyrics) to desolate…
The Long Ryders were once the shit, to use the appropriate slang expression from back in the day. Their albums from the mid-1980s (Native Son, State of Our Union, Two-Fisted Tales) were part of the onslaught of New Wave Cowpunk bands such as Jason and the Scorchers, Green on Red, Rank and File, and the Beat Farmers, that generated excitement among college-age audiences who were turned off by mainstream country acts.
The band took a long hiatus, although they sporadically got together for brief reunions. They released a new studio album in 2019, 32 years after their previous effort. Bassist Tom Stevens died in 2021. The group released their fifth album in 2023 and have been semi-active performing live.
The Long Ryders’ latest record,…
The Set Up is flagged as a companion piece to last year’s Mr. Luck & Ms. Doom, starting off from a tune Willy Vlautin brought in at the end of the sessions, ‘Walking with His Sleeves Down’. Vlautin says, “Amy learned it on piano, and we recorded it live. Her take was stunning, but the song didn’t quite fit with the record. It was lonelier, more rattled, and it missed that rudderless romance that inhabits the world of Mr. Luck & Ms. Doom, so we set it aside”
Stunning doesn’t begin to cover it. If you had a namecheck for Birmingham’s Judas Priest on your Delines lyric bingo card, you can tick it off on this song. Just Amy Boone and piano, bleak but beautiful. The next song that Vlautin brought to the band was ‘The Meter Keeps Ticking’,…
Getting so obsessed with a band that you book a local show just to see them play — we need more freaks like that in the world, and that’s what Merge Records’ Mike Krol did this spring when he put together a bill featuring himself, Shannon Shaw’s new group Voilà!, and this not-so-known New Orleans duo Twisted Teens, Krol’s recent fixation, here in Los Angeles. “I blasted it in the car at night with the windows down, tracked down records, mailordered merch like I was 16, and all of a sudden I felt excited about THE CREATION OF MUSIC again,” he wrote on Instagram. “I couldn’t believe a band I didn’t even know existed at the beginning of this year made — quite possibly — my favorite record of the past 2 decades.” Amen, Mike. This shit tears.
Cowboy hats and colorful shirts can be a deceiving thing for musicians. For a general set of listeners that rely on musical snippets it would immediately indicate that who they have in front of them is your regular cow poking country singer whose life dream is to end up in some Nashville studio leading her/him to Billboard country charts.
Yet in these modern times, classic country (and western) is just one stream, and country pop, roots, Americana, and Canadiana are not only the terms in vogue, but very real genres or sub-genres, however you want to play it, and cowboy hats and colorful shirts are just a prop and a reference that can mean quite a few things.
That brings us to Boy Golden and his latest album, Best of Our Possible Lives. For many…
In the early 1990s, Stephen McCarthy and Kevin Pittman holed up together for a year in a 100-year-old bungalow. McCarthy is well known as a guitarist and vocalist for The Long Ryders, but has also played for The Jayhawks on tour and on some tracks on their latest album Xoxo. Pittman, originally from Reedville, on the coast of Virginia, toured up and down the East Coast with his first major band, The Dogs. This high-energy outfit had some success, for example, opening for The Kinks and Culture Club. He lived in LA for a while but then returned to Virginia, where he still lives. He formed a ’70s R&B band, NRG KRYSYS, which lasted for seven years, but never released an album. In recent years, he has released solo albums “Victrola Mouth” (2019) and “Sundog” (2023).
Most of us have had enough of winter now. But wait. Shout “Taxi” – here’s a band offering a balmy chink of summery light.
vegas water taxi, led by Ben Hambro, have spliced an EP from last year and an EP from last month to form one fantastic LP. long time caller, first time listener, their second album, follows 2023 debut things are gonna be alright and offers a joyful alt-country promise of a social life. Hambro has the sardonic cultural wink of Lou Reed and the melodic ear of The Lemonheads.
The album opens with ‘brat summer’, which imagines the police rounding up folk who hadn’t participated in Charli xcx’s world with the echo of the guitar line from Five’s Keep on Movin’. Backed by some great steel guitar,…
…it is no exaggeration when Zane Mclaughlin of Oldstar, a band from Panama City Beach in Florida’s panhandle, sings, “Let’s pray for my tires / So they don’t spread like wings.” Florida tires need prayers, especially when they have to live through all the driving that happens on Oldstar’s latest project, Of the Highway, a focused, heartfelt country rock record about, mostly, the highway. Oldstar’s first few projects, while showing hints of this album’s country inflections, drew more on a kind of post-Alex G bedroom — slowcore that continues to pervade alternative music — not an uncommon breeding ground for a contemporary alt-country band. But rather than translating that genre’s songwriting norms into the sonic language of major chords, pedal steel, harmonica,…
There is a specific kind of bravery required to be “post-cool.” In an industry obsessed with the frantic energy of the new or the polished artifice of the established, Bristol’s The Lovely Basement have opted for a third path: a relaxed, literate nonchalance that feels less like a performance and more like a conversation. Their 4th album, Lowlands, is a shimmering collection that suggests the band isn’t “too old to care,” but rather old enough to know exactly what is worth caring about.
Released through Precious Recordings of London, Lowlands is an album that demands a shift in the listener’s internal metronome. It has been described as an easygoing listen, but don’t mistake that for background music. This is music that lowers your blood pressure…
Music’s winding road sometimes takes unforeseen turns. Sam Salmon & the Grand Manan Bandits is one of those projects that seemingly appear out of nowhere, making you glad for such detours. Formed by the members of Canadian punk trio Motherhood (Brydon Crain, Penelope Stevens and Adam Sipkema) and guitarist Keith Hallett, the band share their love for alt-country with their debut album Down for Life. However, the Sam Salmon project had been in development for a long time. The opener, ‘If I Needed You’, is a song originally written in 2013 (if the pandemic also stripped you of your bearings, that’s over a decade ago!), under the telling title ‘Country No. 1’, which remained unchanged until very recently.
“Down for Life” is a fun and to-the-point love…
The new Jason Isbell album, Foxes in the Snow, offers an opportunity to appreciate his considerable gifts as a singer, songwriter, and guitarist in a fresh way. It’s his first solo acoustic album and his first that he recorded in New York — in just five days no less at Electric Lady Studios in the West Village.
In February, Isbell played two sold-out shows at the Beacon Theatre, blending the new material with fan favorites from his years with The 400 Unit and the Drive-By Truckers. Each night ended with a carefully chosen cover: a haunting rendition of Bon Iver’s “Best/Rest” on Friday and a tender take on John Prine’s “Storm Windows” on Saturday.
A few days later, during a conversation with WFUV radio, Isbell opened up about the making of the album and the beautiful old guitar that…
“Introducing Self Portrait, the latest chapter from the endlessly inventive one-man force Ryan Adams — a brand-new, 24-track album that brings together fresh, unheard originals alongside spellbinding reinterpretations of classics by R.E.M., New Order and more.
Capturing restless creativity and emotional depth across the two dozen songs, this bold collection once again proves why Ryan Adams is one of the most distinctive voices in modern music. Self Portrait shows Adams at his finest – poignant, unpredictable and sonically rich. For long-time fans, it’s another essential chapter in a prolific career, for newcomers, it is the perfect entry point into the world of Ryan Adams.
This project isn’t just another album from…
“I’m movin’ on,” Daniel Womack sings during the first minute of Easy Company, an album that finds Futurebirds — once the best-kept secret of Athens, GA’s music scene, now a beloved act on a national scale— back in the driver’s seat, speeding together toward some new horizon.
Momentum. Evolution. Expansion. Those are important traits for a critically-acclaimed group that recently celebrated its 15-year anniversary. “When you’ve been a band for as long as we have, there’s a lot of moving on,” says Thomas Johnson. “We just keep going, because that’s how you keep things fresh. That’s how you keep the spark.” By matching the sharply-written songs of three distinct frontmen with a progressive mix of rock & roll, electrified folk, and cosmic American…
Boston-based Brendan Wright has been releasing music – first as Tiberius Wright and more recently just Tiberius – since 2015, when they were still a teenager. Recently, the Tiberius moniker has come to represent a full band rather than a solo project, and the music has shifted too, from dreamy, reverb-drenched slacker indie pop to a tighter, crisper sound that Wright calls ‘farm emo’. 2023 mini-album was a minor masterpiece of small-town catharsis and city alienation, where twangy guitars shared space with power chords and Patsy Cline sentimentalism traded blows with post-hardcore or shoegaze dynamics. It was a winning combination, and a highly original one.
Luckily for us, Wright has chosen to continue down that route with the new full-length…
…features the 15-track album remixed by its original producer David Barbe and remastered by Greg Calbi. The new collection includes the previously unreleased double album Heathens Live at Flicker Bar, Athens, GA – June 20, 2002.
For a musician, the trouble with making your best album is you have to figure out a way to top it next time out, and that isn’t always easy. On their first three albums, the Drive-By Truckers were a better-than-average band from the harder-and-faster end of the alt-country spectrum who blended Replacements-esque snot and slop with a Lynyrd Skynyrd-influenced shot of twangy hard rock. But it was when the Truckers confronted the ghost of Skynyrd as well as the often confusing legacy of both Southern rock and what…
Terry Klein’s fifth studio album, Hill Country Folk Music, offers a moving meditation on aging and memory in intimate and environmental terms. He knows he’s getting older. Youth has passed him by, and the natural world has become a less lovely place, but he’s not old yet, just older, and the despoiled ecology still has its charms. He’s a man in the middle who can’t help but chuckle at his fate. We are going to die someday, and maybe we are all doomed collectively.
Therefore, as he sings on the first and last cuts on the album, the least he can do is “Try” and “Try Again”. (It’s the same song sung differently.) Klein says he values the sound of the river and the stars in the sky. He knows life is more than just lying back and accepting the way…
Joelton Mayfield grew up living and breathing the Bible, through early youth aligning himself unquestioningly with the Christian fundamentalism of his native Texas. You can hear that familiarity and comfort in songs like “Jacob Dreamed a Ladder,” an earnest, entirely natural, slightly updated exploration of the story from the Book of Genesis. “And behold, the lord, as you’ve never seen before, driving down a highway of solid gold/the mover of the mountains bringing peace into the valley down below,” Mayfield croons, wobbling on the notes to give them extra emotional impact. Yet the slow rocking “Now,” hints at a widening perspective, quoting Wilco and the Mountain Goats, as Mayfield discovers the power of secular music. Crowd Pleaser is not about…
The Devil Makes Three has never been accused of making light, vapid music. Across seven albums, the Santa Cruz-based trio has melded blues, folk, Americana, and even influences of punk with often deeply personal, occasionally dark lyrics for a deeply satisfying gothic folk sound. Like Johnny Cash fronting The Cramps, the band has cleaved out a unique sound for more than two decades.
And their latest, Spirits, is no different. In fact, it might be the most Devil Makes Three album yet, as it leans into darker subjects like grief and mortality. “There’s a theme of ghosts and death running through this album,” says frontman Pete Bernhard, who lost his mother, brother, and closest childhood friend while making the record. “The world’s in a strange place right now.