sun 09/02/2025

country

The Great Escape Festival 2024, Brighton review - a dip into day one and the elephant-in-the-room

Before reviewing The Great Escape, we must first deal with the elephant in the room. Or, in this case, the room that’s crushing the elephant, like the trash compactor in the first Star Wars film.THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM BITThere is a boycott, by...

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Album: Abigail Lapell - Anniversary

Anniversary is Canadian singer-songwriter Abigail Lapell’s sixth album (if we include last year’s lengthy EP of lullabies). Her success has not reached much beyond her native land, as is often the way with Canadian acts, but she’s a proven talent,...

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Album: Kings Of Leon - Can We Please Have Fun

The buildup to this album offered quite a bit of hope. The promo blurb with it talks about “cutting loose, trying new things… hark[ing] back to their gritty origins… freed from any expectations.” Most glaringly, it says it’s “the album the band says...

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Mitski, Usher Hall, Edinburgh review - cool and quirky, yet deeply personal

It was her 2018 album Be the Cowboy which saw Mitski propelled to stardom status. Laurel Hell, which followed in 2022, saw her continue on the popstar trajectory with synth-heavy songs, so the more laid back folkiness of last year’s release, The...

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Album: Khruangbin - A LA SALA

This is a reviewer’s nightmare: it’s literally just Khruangbin doing what Khruangbin do. As ever, the Texan trio are rolling out laid-back psychedelic spaghetti western Tex-Mex country-soul-funk groove after laid-back psychedelic spaghetti western...

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Album: The Dead South - Chains & Stakes

There are few ways of describing the music of The Dead South – progressive bluegrass is my favourite because it's so meaningless to so many. By which I mean it doesn't matter what the genre, it's just good music, and that's all you need to know.I...

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Album: Sarah Jarosz - Polaroid Lovers

Critically acclaimed in the US, singer-songwriter Sarah Jarosz has won four Grammies during the course of her career. Born in Texas, spending most of her adult life in New York, her seventh album was created in her new hometown of Nashville, with an...

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Music Reissues Weekly: The Long Ryders - Native Sons

Native Sons joyfully reframed musical styles of the past for the present. Even so, the freshness and oomph of The Long Ryders’ debut album meant revivalism was sidestepped. Originally issued in October 1984, it was a landmark in helping to nurture...

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CMAT, Barrowland Ballroom, Glasgow review - an evening of exuberance

There was a moment towards the end of this exuberant evening when Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson compared the show to a pantomime. This was an extremely apt comparison, in a good way, for alongside the singing and dancing there was a helping of cheeky...

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Album: Kurt Vile - Back to Moon Beach

Back to Moon Beach is a collection of new, reworked and covered songs that feels like a gift from Kurt Vile for his fans to dissect. He jokingly refers to the EP, which is just under an hour long, as “a KV comp”, an appropriate description given the...

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And Then Come the Nightjars review - two farm friends

This modest British dramedy is billed as a “heart-warming story of friendship and survival set against the backdrop of the 2001 Foot and Mouth outbreak”. That’s perhaps not the first catastrophe we associate with that fateful year, but it was a grim...

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Music Reissues Weekly: Playing for the Man at the Door - Field Recordings from the Collection of Mack McCormick

Between the late 1950s and around 1971, Robert “Mack” McCormick (1930–2015) travelled through his base-state Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, west Louisiana and parts of Arkansas and Oklahoma looking for musicians to record. It wasn’t a random process:...

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