Greg Freeman’s 2022 debut album, I Looked Out, doesn’t really begin with a song — just sound. True to its placeholder title, opener “Horns” is 44 seconds of sheer noise: a trio of static-y clarinet, saxophone, and trumpet stretching to an earsplitting, nails-on-a-chalkboard crescendo.
Everything sounds distorted, like it was tracked on an old tape recorder that had been submerged underwater, including the song’s sole “lyric,” the record’s titular phrase. Hearing Freeman speak it, his vocals muddled and tone tentative, you get the sense you’ve stumbled upon something private, a relic you were never meant to discover.
The slow-burn success of I Looked Out has only heightened that feeling. Without backing from a PR campaign or major publications,…
Category: alt-country
…Case Oats’ debut record, Last Missouri Exit, does not reinvent the wheel. But it isn’t trying to, nor does it need to. Frontwoman Casey Gomez Walker’s voice undoubtedly calls on the earnest plaintiveness of Mo Tucker, her songwriting brings to mind David Berman’s interpolation of lived-in specifics and heart-rendingly blunt self-analysis, and the instrumentation takes after Wilco (unsurprising, considering Spencer Tweedy is Gomez Walker’s fiancé and the band’s drummer). The record is squarely set in alt-country territory, yet it still feels fresher than a host of recent albums straining to claim some “lush” sound as invention. Case Oats aren’t forcing originality or fleeing lineage — they’re simply writing what they know, and in doing so, carve out something novel.
Four years have passed since T. Hardy Morris — former member of Dead Confederate and Diamond Rugs — released his last critically acclaimed solo album, The Digital Age of Rome. He didn’t rush into a follow-up, but instead took his time, carefully considering what he wanted to express. The result is Artificial Tears, a record steeped in introspection and deliberate self-examination.
The result is a dozen lo-fi indie rock tracks that focus on identity and searching for meaning delivered through poetically cryptic lyrics that recall everyone from Michael Stipe to Leonard Cohen. On “Don’t Kill Your Time (To Shine)” one of the album’s early singles, Morris offers a plea for the listener to not worry about what others think, delivered over an echoey, dreamy soundtrack…
Earlier this year, Ben Nichols and Rick Steff of Lucero issued the duo album Lucero Unplugged. A solo album from the band’s principal songwriter and frontman seemed like a logical next step, and hence we have In the Heart of the Mountain, Nichols’s second solo album and first in 16 years. Although it is not a concept album like his first solo effort, it draws inspiration from the Arkansas poet Frank Stanford’s “What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford.“
Lucero found the material balanced between mythology and everyday life. He could relate to it, having also grown up in Arkansas. Nichols also claimed that the poetry caused him to write in a way he had never written before.
Nichols has a distinctive, yet love-it-or-hate-it,…
“If you don’t know it yet, it’s my privilege to tell you that Ryan Davis is one of the greatest songwriters of his generation. Bold instinct immediately insists that I lose the qualifications: he’s the greatest of his generation, he’s one of the greatest ever. Whatever. Posterity-if there is a posterity-will sort it out. Happily, New Threats from the Soul has beaten the Doomsday Clock to the wire, and we appear to have a little while left to revel in it, receive its revelations, and be revealed by it.
“Do I know what I’m doing,” A.R. Ammons muses in his Tape for the Turn of the Year, “or am I waiting for it to be done?” That fundamental question seems to me to be the bedrock upon which New Threats is built. It reckons mightily with the perplexities of human efficacy and agency…
…re-mixed by the legendary Sylvia Massy (Prince, Johnny Cash, Tom Petty)
Jason Isbell’s 2013 breakthrough album Southeastern was written and recorded in the wake of Isbell’s newfound sobriety, and it often sounded and felt like a musical version of the Fourth Step, in which Isbell took a long, hard look in the mirror as he came to terms with the emotional wreckage he left in his wake during his years as a drunk. By comparison, Something More Than Free, Isbell’s 2015 follow-up, plays out as the work of a man a year or so into his recovery, grateful but still working with the nuts and bolts of living as a better and more mature man while the shadows of the past remain faintly but clearly visible. The opening tune, “If It Takes a Lifetime,”…
…Milwaukee’s Old Pup, the warmly haunted folk outfit fronted by songwriter and pedal steel virtuoso Will Hansen, has released its sophomore album, Spider Towns. Dropped independently on February 28th, the record is an intimate collection of lyrically vivid and occasionally experimental country-tinged songs, solidifying Hansen’s reputation as a masterful storyteller.
Recorded in various locations — from living rooms and warehouse hallways in Milwaukee and New Orleans to the wide-open fields of New Mexico — Spider Towns carries an ethereal and immediate quality. Hansen’s lyrical dexterity is the album’s anchor, seamlessly weaving the mundane with the interstellar. As fellow songwriter Chris Acker aptly puts it, “Old Pup is Rosetta-stoned.”
Burning bright and turning to ashes just in time to join the 27 Club is liable to cement your legacy forever, or at least for a while. Chances are, though, that that’s not the path any particular musician is on (and all the better for them, however appealing it might seem on a Sunday night when the alarm awaits maliciously, ready to inaugurate another week of mundane work). And so, time flies, here comes middle age and its new perspectives. Bicentennial Drug Lord has put together an album that revolves around this less-sung-about period, and it’s a feel-good, alternatingly touching and funny tribute to all those rockers who survived the turbulent youth exalted in the annals of music history.
Bicentennial Drug Lord is made up of long-time…
Philadelphia power-trio Labrador bills themselves as “MAXIMUM ALT-COUNTRY” (caps theirs). This felt like an apt description for the sound of their last album, Hold the Door for Strangers, a self-released tape which trafficked in sad-sack ballads, story songs and heavy electric twangs reminiscent of the Drive-By Truckers school of songwriting and production. Their third record, My Version of Desire bursts free of the conceptual constraints of alt-country with teeth firmly clenched, invoking the amphetamine drenched, wire tight chord changes and soul/reggae influences of the poppier end of the UK post-punk spectrum. Groups like The Jam, Rockpile, and Dr. Feelgood seem to be the touchstones here, and like Nick Lowe or Paul Weller, singer/songwriter and guitarist…
Alabama’s favorite haunted artists The Pine Hill Haints return with their latest long player, Shattered Pieces Of The True Cross, on Single Lock Records.
The collection of southern psychedelic tunes were recorded at the legendary Muscle Shoals Sound on Jackson Highway, captured and mixed by Ben Tanner, Grammy-winning producer/engineer and Single Lock co-founder.
The Haints have long represented a 21st century chapter in the Muscle Shoals music legacy, applying a DIY ethos to folk and blues traditions. Not unlike their Swamper forebears in the same studio, the Haints transcend their myriad influences to sculpt a sound of their own.
The album bears their signature sonic palette – washtub bass, snare drum…
The promise of a Florry show, a now familiar caravan that has been honed over ambitiously trekked zig zags across America and Europe since the release of Dear Life Records debut The Holey Bible, is the redemptive promise and prodigal joy of rock and roll guitar music.
Bred in the crackling warmth of the Philadelphia DIY scene, and forged with the alloys of community action, queer liberation and bedroom poetry, bandleader Francie Medosch and her absolute unit of collaborators have put in the work of sharpening their homespun tools to take up the mantle of the great lip-puckering rock and roll tradition pioneered by the likes of The Band and the Rolling Stones, but with proudly displayed Aimee Mann and Yo La Tengo bumper stickers…
…Friendship’s fourth album finds the Philadelphia band ascending to greatness, arriving at the place they’ve spent the past decade going. It’s one of the most assured indie rock albums in recent memory, the sound of a brilliant writer coming into his own and a band honing in on the ideal aesthetic complement for his songs, imbuing his quiet indignities with a plaintive grace.
Dan Wriggins sings in coarse baritone barks and bellows that evoke bards of desolation like David Berman and Jason Molina, sketching out moments from a humble life marked by loneliness and daily struggle, but not without a sense of humor. Those are trendy influences here at the peak of Lendermania, but Friendship are not bandwagon jumpers. As two of the main figures…