Americana
Liz Thomson
Down memory lane, taking us back some six decades to the Buffalo Springfield, the latest Neil Young album's almost 50 minutes of continuous music, each song segueing into the next.“Songs from my life, recently recorded, create a music montage with no beginnings or endings,” Young has stated. “The feeling is captured, not in pieces, but as a whole piece, designed to be listened to that way… This music presentation defies shuffling, digital organisation, separation. Only for listening. That says it all.”Well, that’s the idea at least. Getting up from the sofa to move the tone arm was always a Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Kristin Hersh’s voice, it transpires, is ageless. In the 80s when Throwing Muses broke through, she hit a particular combination of tones – blurring boundaries between harsh and smooth, melodic and discordant, trad and weird – that became vastly influential.Along with the likes of Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon and Pixies’s Kim Deal, she not only reconfigured the sense of what the female voice was in rock music, but helped codify singing styles for men and women vocalists in grunge and alt-rock ever after.Later, as the Muses and her solo work evolved, she brought out more historical undercurrents Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Any surprises which Jump for Joy brings aren’t about the nature of the music or the unfailingly open lyrics recounting Hiss Golden Messenger main-man M.C. Taylor’s outlook on his life, but an intermittent undertone suggesting he’s been considering the rhythmic foundations of The War On Drugs. In the sixth song, “Jesus is Bored” there’s a hint of WOD’s fondness for a chugging, insistent tempo. It’s more to the fore on eighth track “Feeling Eternal.”In essence though, Jump for Joy adroitly showcases the mélange the North Carolina-based Taylor has perfected. In the studio here with his touring Read more ...
Liz Thomson
In late 2019, BC, another age, Rhiannon Giddens and Francesco Turrisi stepped on to a Southbank Centre stage and gave one of those mesmerising performances that forever stays in the memory.In the three years or so since, Giddens has been given a clutch of awards, most recently a Pulitzer for her opera Omar. A musical seeker, her career is a journey of exploration through the highways and byways of American music and its intersections. All attempts at categorisation are rejected, Giddens seeing them – largely correctly – as a marketing tool. No doubt that’s why she remains at Nonesuch, an Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Ruarri Joseph is not a household name but in a Sliding Doors scenario, he might have been. Scottish, raised in New Zealand, and based in Cornwall, he signed to Atlantic in 2007, and had the same management as Damien Rice and David Gray. His output was, however, too early for the folk micro-boom engendered by Mumford & Sons, and his songs weren’t whiney enough for mass 21st century tastes in singer-songwriters. He’s consistently been making music, though, and his latest proves the fires are far from out.Seven years ago, Joseph focused his attention on a new project, William The Conqueror, Read more ...
India Lewis
Lorrie Moore’s brief but haunting I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home is a bizarre, unsettling read. At times it’s a road trip, at others a romance, then supernatural horror, Greek tragedy, or an epistolary short story nestled within the larger text. Underlying this, however, is a poetic tale of grief and loss, and of how it’s almost impossible to be free of the dead when they are still living (sometimes corporally) for the mourner.Beginning with a letter, sent in the period just after the American Civil War, a part of I Am Homeless is told by the mistress (Elizabeth/Miss Libby) of a Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Some country music cosies up as close as possible to pop, in hopes of dragging more listeners in, smoothing away the raw backwoods feel. The most famed exemplar of this route is, of course, Taylor Swift, at least in her early career. Other country music resonates with American folk history, emanating the vastness of the American south, its roots sounds and narratives. Molly Tuttle falls into the latter category and her latest album, her fourth, whips the listener off on a journey that’s as effective as a book of short stories, but with the added benefit of being a toe-tappin’ hoodang.Tuttle Read more ...
Liz Thomson
2020 was a cruel year for everybody but in addition to the horrors of Covid which included the loss of her compadre John Prine to the virus, Lucinda Williams endured damage to her Nashville home in a tornado and then, in November 2020, she suffered a stroke, which left her with impaired motor skills on her left side. Playing the guitar was no longer as natural as breathing and that would in turn make songwriting difficult. She needed a cane to walk. But within a year, she was road-ready and back in front of an audience though not (yet) playing guitar.So Stories from a Rock ‘n’ Roll Heart is Read more ...
Liz Thomson
"This album is almost like a recorded birthday party and birthday present to myself. I just invited all the singers that I greatly admire and always wanted to sing with." So says Rufus Wainwright, a brilliant and compelling performer – and one, you suspect, who brooks few challenges, be they from family, friends, or producers. And someone needed to tell him that Folkocracy is often a tad OTT. Rather more than a tad actually.There are some lovely moments but rarely is the singer subservient to the song. On this album, it’s all about Rufus. Me, me, me. Striking poses, seeking attention, showing Read more ...
Liz Thomson
It’s 27 years since Gretchen Peters released her debut album, The Secret of Life, championed by Bob Harris and the late Terry Wogan, whose morning-tide enthusiasms also helped propel Eva Cassidy and Beth Neilsen Chapman to success - the term “Americana” hadn’t yet been invented!Peters has been touring Britain for some 25 years, unusually for an American recording a live album here (The Show: Live from the UK), which captured her just pre-Covid performing a career-spanning selection of songs with the all-female Southern Fried String Quartet. She’s won, or been nominated for, a raft of Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
There will be two theartsdesk on Vinyls this week. The first is here, an epic 11,000 words on a multitude of new releases in every genre, from reissues of classics to spanking new strangeness. There’s something for everyone. On Thursday we’ll have a special edition in honour of Record Store Day this coming Saturday, so watch out for that too. For now, though, dive in!VINYL OF THE MONTHElsa Bergman Playon Crayon (B.Inspelningar)In the mid-1960s British composer and pal of Stockhausen, Cornelius Cardew, composed a piece called Treatise whose sheet music consisted of a series of symbolic Read more ...
Cheri Amour
Maybe you’ve heard the Native American parable about the two wolves. An old Cherokee’s grandson is grappling with internal tensions; self-hatred and self-aggrandising. For Phoebe Bridgers, one-third of indie supergroup boygenius (usually styled with no initial capital letter), this analogy sits at the heart of album standout ‘Not Strong Enough’. In it, the trio, completed by Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker, let out the divine line “Always an angel / Never a god,” adding a wry smile to the delivery.Subverting male hero worship is one of the (many) things that’s so refreshingly brilliant about a Read more ...