“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…
Category: americana
Deviate may be the debut album from Oxford-based indie Americana band Steady Habits, but it comes on the back of a burgeoning reputation based on festival appearances, supporting the likes of Danny George Wilson and the odd single release following the band’s 2020 EP Hold in Your Breath. Frontman Sean Duggan hails from New England and the album is shaped by both this physical and emotional journey. It is a journey shaped by Duggan’s memories of home, family and his queer experiences.
The title track is a love letter to his younger self and to those growing up in a world that seems, in Duggan’s eyes, to be eroding freedoms of expression. “The LGBTQ+ community have long been labelled as deviants. This song…
Atmosphere is the third album from North Carolina-based singer/songwriter Alexa Rose, with ten songs partly shaped by the devastation heaped on her community by Hurricane Helene. It’s not the first time Rose has conjured aching beauty out of the most trying of times – after all, her previous album, Headwaters, was written during the pandemic – but Hurricane Helene had a far more direct impact on this album.
Born in the Alleghany Highlands of Western Virginia, Alexa Rose was raised in the tiny railroad town of Clifton Forge. She moved in 2013 to study music at Appalachian State University, and she continues to be based in North Carolina. After graduating in 2016, she took to the road with her own songs, and she’s been touring…
American Aquarium dropped their Live at Red Rocks album and they performed their song about Wichita Falls during the concert.
It was just over a year ago that American Aquarium performed at the Red Rock Amphitheater in Colorado. This was not the band’s first show at this venue, however this one in May of 2024 was recorded for a live album. One song that a lot of folks love here locally is ‘Wichita Falls’. We have a lot of songs that mention or are written about Wichita Falls. Pat Metheny’s album ‘As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls’ is probably the most famous nationally. American Aquarium’s song titled Wichita Falls is probably the most famous here in town. American Aquarium front man BJ Barham wrote the song after a concert in 2013 at The Iron Horse Pub.
Strange Trip Ahead is Canadian Mariel Buckley’s third studio album, after her 2018 debut Driving in the Dark and 2022’s Everywhere I Used to Be. It is no great departure from these two, but that’s okay, as it is full of good songs with great “earworm” melodies and catchy choruses.
The music can be described as indie-alt-country, which is a bit like later Lilly Hiatt albums, but lighter and less raunchy. The rock in it is tempered by the electric guitar being pushed back a little in the mix, whether it is riffing or being played as a lead. You can’t help but be reminded of eighties and nineties pop, but with no synthesisers and with a country feel, partly coming from the gentle steel guitar added. The music complements Buckley’s vocals very well to give a sound…
To say Pete Muller is a hugely talented guy would be an enormous understatement. Not only is he an excellent singer/songwriter, but wait for this. He is a Quantitative Trader, starting and becoming C.E.O. of a multi-billion-dollar investment firm, and a philanthropist, a founding member of Math America and a Live Music Trustee. And if that wasn’t enough, he regularly contributes Crosswords for the New York Times and has also come fourth in a World Poker Challenge.
It’s incredible to think he has the time for music, but this is his fourth studio release in the last five years. Recorded in Bath at Peter Gabriel’s studio, it is a very assured, mature collection of songs.
In describing the considerations behind One Last Dance, Muller reflects, “I’ve led…
…features the complete original record remastered by David Grisman, plus outtakes and alternate versions (including two previously unreleased tracks) from Dawg’s vault.
The second full-length collaborative effort between Jerry Garcia (guitar/vocals) and David Grisman (mandolin, mando-cello, tenor banjo, vocals) is arguably their most endearing as well. Just as its title suggests, Not for Kids Only (1993) is an album of folkie standards and traditional tunes that is — as Grisman so eloquently depicts in his liner notes — “our answer to ‘Barney.'”
The material chosen is comprised of songs they had undoubtedly encountered at one time or another during their respective careers, both of which were deeply rooted in…
For name alone, Maygen & The Birdwatcher deserve plaudits for originality, but you don’t have to listen to their fusion of bluegrass and folk for long to appreciate that such creativity runs deep in the veins of this fine band from Minnesota, led by the songwriting duo Maygen Lacey and Noah Neumann. The Americana Dream is their second full-length album that quashes any doubts often attached to a sophomore release.
Their acclaimed 2021 debut Moonshine introduces this rootsy shot of americana, something they built on with an EP last year. With The Americana Dream, Maygen & The Birdwatcher fly to a higher level from which they contemplate just that, the American Dream. This looks a daunting task, but as their songs demonstrate, they express…
Courtney Hartman’s previous album, 2021’s Glade, was very much a solitary affair – Hartman recorded the bulk of it alone as she lived in a barn on the property of her childhood Colorado home – but with her new album, the appropriately titled With You, she reached out to those around her and created an album written, funded and recorded with her friends, fans and collaborators. The album documents a huge shift in Hartman’s life, too: becoming a mother for the first time.
Her journey to motherhood and beyond looms large over the album, beginning at the opening track ‘Softening’. “All of the edges now are softening / See the light almost standing still / For you,” Hartman opens, her voice barely more than a whisper, backed by an ethereal…
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…
Over the years, West Virginian Charles Wesley Godwin has built up a reputation for delivering excellent live shows. He’s supported artists such as Luke Combs and Zach Bryan and is at present out on the road with Eric Church. Live from the Steel City is a 23-track album that displays Godwin’s expertise and showcases his expansive catalogue of road-tested material and the prowess of The Allegheny High. Godwin describes Live from the Steel City as a recording of “a live show the boys and I have curated in bars, clubs, theatres, amphitheatres, arenas and stadiums over the last several years”. The speakers sound stacked for this sold-out gig at the AE Outdoor stage in Pittsburgh. Recorded in September 2024, the day before the Pittsburgh Steelers played…
Detroit-based Ethan Daniel Davidson is nothing if not prolific. Lear is Davidson’s 14th studio album and, even more impressively, his second of 2025. If that earlier album, Cordelia, helped reinforce a reputation as a reflective songwriter, then Lear, which emerged from those same sessions, can be assumed to be a companion piece.
The album has been compared to Neil Young’s On the Beach insofar as it is dripping in melancholy and ache. In its tone and tempo, it hints that Cohen wouldn’t be so far wide of the mark either. Davidson is mining the dark corners of his own psyche here, and it shows. His songs have become more autobiographical, and opening track ‘Stop Breaking Down’ has Davidson reflecting on a hitchhiking youth, of bad…
Golden Brown’s Stefan Beck was inspired by Ursula K. LeGuin’s Earthsea series as he wrote this suite of songs, and he encourages listeners to read the books while absorbing Patterner. His interpretation isn’t especially literal; the title comes from a master wizard in the trilogy and a couple of the track titles are place names from the world LeGuin built. However, the books have a wonderful down-to-earth naturalism, spiked with the glitter of occasional magic, and massed, sometimes, into epic contours. That’s something this music has as well, a cosmic Americana made of ordinary sounds — guitar picking, cello predominate — polished to a heightened, semi-surreal clarity.
Beck has made three previous albums as Golden Brown. He’s also a member of Prairiewolf,…
All That Remains is a collection of live performances captured on the road, live and in living color.
Austin, Texas roots rockers the Band of Heathens play music that filters contemporary singer/songwriter and alt-country flavors through the guiding influence of dusty 1970s soft rock. Founded by three songwriters, the group specialize in tales with a distinct Southern flavor and characters with a taste for misadventure, buoyed by tasteful arrangements and harmonies.
Formed in Austin, the Band of Heathens became a group totally by accident. Songwriters Colin Brooks, Gordy Quist, and Ed Jurdi were all doing regular sets at Momo’s in Austin when they began sitting in with each other, eventually making the whole…
Throughout his idiosyncratic career, it has been impossible to figure out where Mike Patton will turn next, but even his most diehard fans would have been hard-pressed to believe the announcement of a new group with folk chart-toppers The Avett Brothers was true, yet that is exactly what happened. The newly christened AVTT/PTTN worked together on a self-titled album that touches on buzzing rock, dusty Americana, and theatrically polished, over-the-top set pieces.
Scott Avett started working on demos and sent them to Patton with no set project idea, but then things clicked as Patton responded with twists and turns on the original folk numbers. Patton has stated that he may have worked too long on past projects, and that this opportunity…
…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…