…Originally shelved by his label in 2001, this 21-track record has finally seen an official release.
The Suicide Handbook is Ryan Adams’ most elusive and mythic recordings. The album is a raw and intimate collection of songs that captures the songwriter at his most unguarded. Recorded at the beginning of his solo career and long circulating only through bootlegs, the album has earned a legendary status among die-hard fans and fans of the Americana genre alike for its stark stripped-back beauty.
Acoustic arrangements and hushed, late-night vocals, these songs feel like private confessions set to tape. Adams leans into themes of heartbreak, isolation, and emotional vulnerability, delivering recordings that are as fragile…
Category: alt-country
After making their Dualtone label debut with 2024’s Easy Company, Futurebirds return with their sixth album and first double-length outing, Far Out Country. It reunites the alternative country-rock group with Easy Company producer Brad Cook as well as contributors like pedal steel guitarist (and former member) Dennis Love and Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield. As for the band proper, it features the lineup of Daniel Womack, Carter King, and Thomas Johnson — their three rotating singer/songwriters — along with the returning rhythm section of Brannen Miles and Tom Myers. Perhaps to a higher degree than on prior releases, it showcases the individual perspectives of each songwriter, with personal songs inspired by things like relationships, first-time…
Musicians who become parents sometimes feel compelled to write songs about it. But really, what is there to say? Every parenthood experience is unique, and also very much the same, and probably has been for something like three hundred thousand years since humans evolved. All the wonder or magic inherent in the process is deeply personal, and therefore dreary as hell when someone else sings about it. That’s a grinchy perspective, no question, but Shakey Graves — a.k.a. Alejandro Rose-Garcia — does little to change it on his latest, Fondness, etc..
The album is said to reflect the new contours of Rose-Garcia’s life with his wife and young daughter, who was born in 2024. That means these songs are in many ways about…
Cowboy Junkies release Open to Beauty, a transparent yellow 3-LP and 2 CD collection of songs from their 21st century albums to date. This ‘Best Of’ set revisits selected tracks from albums Open, One Soul Now, Early 21st Century Blues, At The End of Paths Taken, Renmin Park, Demons, Sing In My Meadow, The Wilderness, All That Reckoning, Songs of the Recollection, and Such Ferocious Beauty.
Speaking about the new collection, Cowboy Junkies’ Michael Timmins said: “We are now 25 years into this century, the beginning of which saw us leave the world of major labels and return to making music as an independent band. We figured this was as good a time as any to look back, reassess, and reflect on the music…
Blood Sucking Maniacs, the Allen family band, helmed by patriarch and matriarch Terry Allen and Jo Harvey Allen, spans five generations and 121 years, including (among others) their sons Bukka and Bale Allen; grandsons Kru, Sled, and Calder Allen; Panhandle Mystery Band mainstays Charlie Sexton, Lloyd Maines, and Richard Bowden, and frequent collaborator Will Sexton.
…Giving themselves the collective name Blood Sucking Maniacs, the songs are free, wild, tender, and gloriously unruly. Put all the contributions together, and we find a mash-up of heart-punch ballads, familial rib-prods, and everything in between, shifting from the sublime to the unabashedly sentimental with maximum integrity.
The name was inspired by their son Bale,…
It can take years to develop the kind of band chemistry you can hear straight away, the kind that’s all over mildred’s debut album Fenceline.
It’s not just that the Oakland four-piece write and sing democratically, it’s that their shared authorship feels like a genuine meeting of ideas passed around the room rather than delivered from any one fixed point. What could have felt piecemeal instead feels companionable and lived-in. There’s real warmth in that, and trust too. These are people you want to be friends with: unselfconscious, generous and together because they like the sound of each other’s instincts.
Opener “UPS Brown” gets that across beautifully. A low violin drone runs under guitars that feel both worn and careful, with crunchy…
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…
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…