country
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Context is everything. It’s the difference between that “lady without a baby” line that’s got everybody talking delivered straight up, and the knowing smile and cross-dressing Hollywood actresses that come with it in the song’s accompanying video. It’s why Jenny Lewis, child starlet turned indie rock frontwoman turned accomplished alt-country singer-songwriter, is that rare artist who has made not only the best album for herself at every stage of her career, but also the one that her fans needed to hear.Depending on your reading of “Just One of the Guys”, it’s a song about confounding Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
It feels as if the life-on-the-road song has become a rite of passage for those rock bands that manage to clock up enough years together, but after 20 years in the business Texan alt-country rockers Old 97’s probably have more of a claim to it than most. Clocking in at just under six minutes, “Longer Than You’ve Been Alive” is one of the best examples of the genre, regardless of its titular accuracy. It’s a meandering, tongue-in-cheek portrait of the rock star excesses, but also the tedium, that comes with life in a moderately successful touring band. As frontman Rhett Miller reminisces, most Read more ...
Tim Cumming
You’d have to go back to 1996’s Spirit to name a Willie Nelson album with more than one or two original new songs, so the nine for Band of Brothers is something like headline news. Produced by Buddy Cannon – their previous collaboration, To All the Girls, took Willie back into the Top 10 for the first time since the 1980s – it features a deft band of guitar, steel, piano, bass and drums, with Mickey Raphael’s harmonica roaming around Nelson’s wandering way with a vocal and his totemic guitar, Trigger. This isn’t music that goes over the top; it gets under the skin. There’s no melodrama or Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Something about First Aid Kit has always seemed a little too polished, too perfect. While there can be no denying that their 2012 breakthrough record The Lion’s Roar is a rich, lovely listen – in no small part thanks to the charm of Klara and Johanna Söderberg’s effortless harmonies – its strict adherence to the trail blazed by its transatlantic influences kept me from finding it as magical as the rest of the world seemed to. If the question is how do two sisters from Stockholm follow something as technically perfect as that album on their major label debut, its first single “My Silver Lining Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If they ever wanted somebody to make a sequel to Marty Robbins's Gunfighter Ballads and usher in a rockabilly revival for good measure, Jack White is the man. The 11 tracks on this new album - the follow-up to 2012's Blunderbuss - reek of rage, lust, drink and gunpowder (among other things), and most of them crash along like a herd of stampeding buffalo.Identifying every ingredient White has smuggled in could take years, but he squeezes bags of mileage out of crashing piano chords, guitars that sound like steel girders being hammered out of shape and country fiddles that yowl like mating cats Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Howling Bells have come a long way in the 10 years since they settled on a name and direction for their musical project, both physically - the four-piece uprooted themselves from Sydney, Australia to their adopted hometown of London to record and promote their self-titled debut album - and philosophically. In 2006, their combination of heavy, gloomy guitars and toe-tapping melodies topped with songwriter Juanita Stein’s effortlessly cool vocals deservedly attracted the frenzied attention of the music press and Bella Union boss Simon Raymonde, but that attention died down after a series of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Gram Parsons: The Early Years Vol 1 & 2Without Gram Parsons, The Rolling Stones could not have transformed themselves into what they became in the late Sixties and early Seventies. The bond between the South Carolina-born walking encyclopaedia of the music of America’s south and Keith Richards changed the Stones. Without Parsons there would have been no Eagles. They emerged from what he developed with The Flying Burrito Brothers and turned it into platinum. Without Parsons, Emmylou Harris would not have had the opportunity to soar. Parsons died in 1973 and did not rejoice in the Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
If English Oceans is the Drive-By Truckers finest album since 2004’s The Dirty South - and I’d argue that it is - I doubt it was intentional. A little time away; more of a partnership of equals between founder members and songwriters Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley; and inspirations rooted as much in real life (“Grand Canyon”, dedicated to the memory of crew member and friend Craig Leiske) as in fiction (“Pauline Hawkins”, named for a character in a Willy Vlautin novel) find the southern-fried country rock veterans in a creative place that sounds both vibrant and effortless.What probably helps Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Since Nashville and country music are one giant soap opera, it's amazing nobody turned Tennessee's Music City into a TV series before. No matter. Here we are with series two, and it's as deliriously cheesy and melodramatic as ever.The first series ended with veteran country star Rayna James (Connie Britton) and her alcoholic guitarist/former lover Deacon Claybourne hurtling into a cataclysmic car crash. Series two opened amid the wreckage and the squeaking of tortured metal, with flashbacks to when Deacon and Rayna were young and in lurve (bravo for a splendid decades-rewinding job by the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Drawing colour from country and Appalachian traditions while echoing the world-weary moods of singer-songwriters like Karen Dalton, Kris Kristofferson, Willie Nelson and Townes Van Zandt, the third album from Oklahoma’s Samantha Crain doesn’t surprise musically. Kid Face constructs its world carefully and deliberately, but although like the disclosure of a private world still feels immediate.Kid Face follows up to 2010’s You (Understood) and is more sparse. It’s even more so than the album which preceded that, 2009’s Songs in the Night, recorded with her former band The Midnight Shivers. By Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Country music in the 21st century is the weirdest thing, and not much of it seems to have to do with the country any more. At its commercial end, it sells billions of records by men with tight T-shirts and women with very white teeth who all drive gigantic 4x4s, making gigastars (in the US at least) of the likes of Tim McGraw and Taylor Swift. Elsewhere there is rootsy bluegrass for urban hipsters, avant-garde classical-electronica-folk, and a vast swathe of “alt.country” and Americana acts that blur the lines between indie rock and retro country.It's in this last category that Shonna Tucker Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Beachwood Sparks: Desert SkiesBeachwood Sparks didn’t become Fleet Foxes, but their DNA is integral to the harmonious Seattleites. Both bands have been issued by the Sub Pop label, but after two albums Beachwood Sparks drifted apart in 2002. Fleet Foxes picked up the torch in 2008. The connection is more than a shared label and general musical preferences. It’s through the torch held for Gram Parsons's “cosmic American music” and the debt both owe to David Crosby’s 1971 solo album If I Could Only Remember my Name. Beachwood Sparks had started something – a parallel path to, but not, Read more ...