country
Kieron Tyler
The presence of Nashville’s Erin Rae and Caitlin Rose on guest vocals suggests Spencer Cullum's Coin Collection could be a take on country music. Indeed, the album was recorded in Nashville and Cullum has contributed pedal steel to live shows and records by A-grade Music City star Miranda Lambert. However, Cullum has also played on records by Herman Dune and Kesha. His first solo album sounds nothing like a product of Nashville.Cullum is British and has been based in Nashville for close to a decade. His work as a session player has been stellar; he’s been on stage with Dolly Parton. Coin Read more ...
Guy Oddy
It’s almost 25 years since Alabama 3 unleashed their “sweet, pretty country acid house gospel music” on an unsuspecting world with Exile on Coldharbour Lane – one of the finest records of the late 20th Century. 12 albums later and with their first since 2016’s Blues, the band are still very much rooted in a world of urban weirdos and misfits, and this is all to the good.Step 13 is a largely up tempo, toe-tapping antidote to a Covid-damaged, post-Brexit Britain that doesn’t shy away from commenting on the political landscape, but nor does it hammer Alabama 3’s views down anyone’s throat either Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Saunders' Ferry Lane” elegantly paints a picture of revisiting an empty, out-of-season neighbourhood to reflect on an old relationship. It’s cloudy and begins raining. The grass where the couple lay is dead. Birds have flown away. The gentle arms which held the narrator are gone. “I find no present comfort for my pain” sings a forlorn Sammi Smith. Swelling strings darken the mood, as does a plaintive pedal steel.Discomfort of a different kind is addressed by Billie Jo Spears’ up-tempo “Mr Walker, It's All Over.” After leaving Garden City, Kansas for New York to work, she fetches coffee for Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Scottish singer-songwriter Dorothy Allison pretty much defines cool. Her band One Dove was the first to snare Andrew Weatherall as producer after his success with Screamadelica, and together they created Morning Dove White: an extraordinary album that fused country and western melancholy with deep dub and electronica. It brought extraordinarily grown up emotion to the rave generation and creating the archetypal comedown soundtrack to the devoted few who loved it.Since then she’s worked with everyone from Massive Attack to Paul Weller, Death In Vegas to Pete Doherty (he used to be talented and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Karen Black’s connection with music was never hidden. In Robert Altman’s 1975 film Nashville she played a country singer. In 1970’s Five Easy Pieces she was a would-be country singer. In Nashville, two of the songs she sang were self-penned. She also dueted with Kris Kristofferson in 1972’s Cisco Pike.Hollywood logic usually dictates that an actor with musical inclinations – however shaky – issues a record. Hence releases by William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, Peggy Lipton, Annette Funicello and a million more. Yet nothing from the evidently musically capable Karen Black. (In 1965, there had Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Harry Grafton (b. 1978) is the preferred title of Henry Fitzroy, 12th Duke of Grafton, custodian of Euston Hall in Suffolk and the man behind the Red Rooster Festival. The latter, during its six pre-COVID years of existence, built a reputation for presenting fresh, fiery and exciting American roots music. All being well, it returns this August. Grafton started in the music business in the early years of this century in Nashville, Tennessee, where he also had a radio show. His Stateside sojourn culminated in a job on the Rolling Stones global A Bigger Bang Tour. Upon the death of his father in Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Lambchop leader Kurt Wagner has suggested that the title of this album is semi literal: that he wanted to write “something akin” to classic, Great American Songbook show tunes, rather than his usual country-tinged style. If so, it’s for a rather gloomy sort of a show. At the beginning, it does suggest you’re going to get some high drama: the rather Leonard Cohen-ish “A Chef’s Kiss” would certainly fit in a middle of a musical in the “how did I get here, where will I go?” bit where the protagonist is alone in the spotlight on a blank stage. But where you might expect such a number to pick up Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
There’s a line in “No Home”, the staggering centrepiece of Lady Dan’s debut album, that perhaps sums up the project. “Wolves will never be my masters again,” the artist, real name Tyler Dozier, sings as the strings swell, in a voice like the wilderness. “Men will never be my owners again.”The distinctive minor-key arpeggiated riff that punctuates the track was, says Dozier, “originally supposed to be a worship song”. Dozier grew up up in Dothan, Alabama – a city named for the biblical location where Joseph’s brothers threw him into a well before selling him into slavery – in a strict Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Last month Willie Nelson wowed us with a new album. Now comes Loretta Lynn, a year older (89 next month) with her 50th studio outing. It must be something in that proud Cherokee blood they share.Born in poverty, married at 13. Four children and several miscarriages by 21, twins a decade later. A grandmother at 34. And of course, the hard-drinking, unfaithful husband to whom she was married for 50 years... Lynn’s story is a country classic, and like Dolly Parton she’s told it memorably in song, the hard-scrabble Kentucky childhood laid bare in “Coal Miner’s Daughter”, the song which would Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The ninth track on this collection of interpretations of songs written by Kris Kristofferson is so surprising it’s bewildering. The commentary in the booklet of For The Good Times – The Songs Of Kris Kristofferson notes its “sneering Joe Strummer-like delivery” and that the “guitar-heavy riff is very Clash-like.” Baffling. Could a Kristofferson song merit these words? However, sticking the compilation in the CD player reveals “Rock and Roll Time” as so like The Clash, it could be them. Played alongside “Should I Stay or Should I go”, it passes for a Joe Strummer repost to the Mick Jones song. Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Ten years ago yesterday, on Monday 14th February 2011, one of theartsdesk’s writers, Joe Muggs, reviewed an album called Paranormale Aktivitat, by an outfit called Zwischenwelt. It was the first ever Disc of the Day, a new slot inserted into theartsdesk’s front page design, where it still resides today. By the end of the year, we’d introduced the now-obligatory stars-out-of-five system, keeping in the swim with other reviewing media. Since then, Disc of the Day has covered approximately 2600 albums and, before COVID, when the tube trains were running, it gave me great pleasure to see those Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
When the concept album first properly took flight, in the late 1960s, before it became slave to the bloated artifice of prog-rock, it was an extension of the LSD-soaked times: “Songs aren’t big enough, man, I need a bigger canvas!” Famed albums by The Beatles, The Beach Boys, The Kinks and The Pretty Things sum up this golden period. The second album from singer-songwriter James Wallace’s Skyway Man persona is a psychedelic concept piece, but in line with this wide-eyed period, rather than crap by Yes and the like. Wallace’s psychonaut indie ruminations are, thus, loaded with opaque visionary Read more ...