Americana
Liz Thomson
A year ago, Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, his work commended by the committee "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition". The media response was like no other and we admirers felt vindicated. Still it was often necessary to explain why he deserved it and easy to fall back on the evidence of that mighty handful of great 1960s albums, plus Blood On the Tracks, Oh Mercy and Time Out of Mind.Professor Christopher Ricks, long-time Dylan advocate whose vast output includes a fat tome on Dylan’s Visions of Sin, was among the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
American classics dominate the straight plays in London’s West End. Whenever a producer wants to revive a straight drama, they will inevitably look first at the back catalogue of Tennessee Williams or Arthur Miller or, in this case, David Mamet. Then they stuff the production full of stars: in this case, superstar Christian Slater, plus Robert Glenister, Kris Marshall, Stanley Townsend and Don Warrington all shining in the firmament. Together they make this revival of Mamet’s 1983 classic, Glengarry Glen Ross, a masterclass in testosterone-fuelled acting.From its haunting title, to its Read more ...
Javi Fedrick
An underground American star since 2010’s Strange Cacti EP, Angel Olsen’s distinctive brand of indie folk-rock was propelled to new heights in both Burn Your Fire For No Witness (2014) and then last year with MY WOMAN. After years of touring, interviews, videos and topping end-of-year lists, Phases, the singer-songwriter's new album of rarities, B-sides, and previously unreleased songs, takes us back to a time when delicacy ruled her music. Its vulnerability suggests that long-time fans will be more than happy to follow Olsen musically back in time and out of the spotlight.“Fly on Your Wall Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
80 Aching Orphans ought to be hard work. A four-CD, 80-track, 274-minute overview chronicling 45 years of one of pop’s most wilful bands should be a challenging listen. The Residents have never made records which are straightforward or were meant to be, and have never made records conforming to prevailing trends. Sometimes, they’ve chimed with the ethos of passing zeitgeists like punk but, when that’s happened, it’s been about the times themselves rather than anything intrinsic to The Residents.However, with its flow and internal harmoniousness the casebound box set 80 Aching Orphans Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Close your eyes and be transported. Not just to Greenwich Village, New York and America’s west, but to Copenhagen, Belfast and Swansea, from whence Dylan Thomas – dedicatee of “The Sparrow of Swansea” – set out on his adventures. The album was recorded in Austin, Texas, and the spirit and the sound of such country music greats as Johnny Cash, Marty Robbins and Roy Orbison permeate the music.Russell is an architect of “Americana” and his mighty fistful of albums includes a series of folk operas, including the much-lauded Rose of Roscrae. His songs have been recorded by Cash, Doug Sahm and Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Dylan aficionados will get the cover art reference immediately: one of Elliott Landy’s celebrated Woodstock photos, taken in 1968. Joan Osborne, Grammy nominated “no-nonsense Dylan” (New York Times) interpreter, is wearing neither hat nor guitar on the sleeve of her latest album but the allusion is clear and two of the songs on what she hopes will develop into a “songbook series” (in the manner of Ella Fitzgerald’s homage to the great American songwriters) are from The Basement Tapes.On this her ninth studio album, the Kentucky-born singer-songwriter who’s called New York City home for some Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Iron and Wine’s songs sweet melancholy songs are instantly recognisable, as if their principal author Sam Beam inhabited a parallel universe of the American imagination, a slightly whimsical and yet soulful territory, in which the extremes of hope and despair, love and disappointment, joy and grief, co-exist, feed of one another and provide one of the essential tonal colours of what is know as Americana.There has always been a strain of hard-sought purity in the American adventure, a natural and yet paradoxical contrast with the greed and a territorial expansion and exploitation that have as Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
According to Pete Frame’s book Rock Family Trees, Fairport Convention had 15 different line-ups between 1968 and 1978, the period covered by the new box set Come All Ye – The First 10 Years. Fairport Convention #7, extant from November 1971 to February 1972, featured no one from the first three iterations of the band, which had taken them up to June 1969. Evidently, the actuality of Fairport Convention is fluid.Despite this, there is an established and (relatively) clearly defined arc. One traced by Come All Ye. Their first album, made with Judy Dyble as their singer, was a response to Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Sam Shepard came to live in London in 1971, nursing ambitions to be a rock musician. When he went home three years later, he was soon to be found on the drumstool of Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder tour. But in between, not long after he arrived in London, he was waylaid by the burgeoning fringe scene, and the rock god project took a back seat. His reputation from the New York underground for courting danger, taking risks, living on the edge etc went before him, and the savage immediacy of his plays found a natural home in the small space houses of the capital.Outside the inner circle of the Read more ...
Liz Thomson
“So you wanna be an outlaw, better take it from me/ Living on the highway, ain't everything it's supposed to be” sings Steve Earle on the opening track of his latest album, with a little help from Willie Nelson. Recorded in Texas, where Earle did most of his growing up and where he began to play music, So You Wannabe An Outlaw is an acknowledgment of his roots and influences and an “unapologetic” channelling of Waylon Jennings, a fellow Texan with a career as multi-faceted as Earle’s own.The album’s frame of musical reference is wide: the bluesy “If Mama Could Seen Me”, commissioned by T-Bone Read more ...
Liz Thomson
“So you wanna be an outlaw, better take it from me/ Living on the highway, ain't everything it's supposed to be” sings Steve Earle, a man with no shortage of outlawish credentials, on the opening track of his latest album, with a little help from Willie Nelson. Recorded in Texas, where Virginia-born Earle did most of his growing up and where he began to play music, So You Wannabe An Outlaw is an acknowledgment of his roots and influences and an “unapologetic” channelling of Waylon Jennings, a fellow Texan with a career as multi-faceted as Earle’s own.The album’s frame of musical reference is Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Wow! An unconventional opening for a book review maybe, but ‘“wow!” nonetheless. Subtitled "How Skiffle Changed the World", this is an impressive work of popular scholarship by the singer, songwriter and social activist whose 40-year (and counting) career has embraced folk, punk, rock and Americana, and various combinations of those genres. It has also seen him anointed as an heir to Woody Guthrie, the late great journalist and song-maker, the Dust Bowl balladeer who, more than half a century ago, wrote a song about a little-known racketeer landlord whose mercenary tactics would lay the Read more ...