country
Jasper Rees
Ken Burns is the closest American television has to David Attenborough. They may swim in different seas, but they both have an old-school commitment to an ethos that will be missed when it’s gone – the idea that television is a place to communicate information with a sober sense of wonder. Burns’s field is American history in all its breadth and depth. Last time round it was a lapidary decalogue of documentaries about the Vietnam War. That had such an impact that, for his latest, BBC Four have promoted his name to the title to create a forgivable misnomer: Country Music by Ken Burns.The Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Lady Antebellum have stayed in the mainstream country world Taylor Swift forded to full pop stardom. Beginning alongside her on Nashville’s aptly named Big Machine label, they’ve kept the genre’s knack for narrative, emotion and residual hints of authenticity alongside imposing chart power. As slide guitar, fiddle and harmonica symbolically curl around big, slick choruses, they aren’t so far from the “big hat” music which made Garth Brooks oddly parallel gangsta-rap as the sound of America at the dawn of the Nineties. Lady Antebellum offer more 21st century, feminised sensitivity, alluding to Read more ...
Ellie Porter
With US number one singles and Grammys coming out of his ears, a record-breaking streak at the top for debut album This One’s For You and collaborations with country big-timers aplenty, Luke Combs is riding high. The North Carolina-born toast of Nashville (he was also inducted into the Grand Ole Opry this summer) keeps things going with second album What You See Is What You Get, a rambling, occasionally brilliant collection of drinking songs, lovelorn ballads and earnest tributes to the working man.The first five songs will already be familiar to fans – they made up The Prequel, a massive- Read more ...
Ellie Porter
There’s no getting around it – it’s very surreal indeed to be in the Shepherd’s Bush Empire and see an eye-wateringly famous movie and TV star rocking out on stage. But it’s a testament to Kiefer Sutherland’s commitment to his musical side-project that this never overwhelms what turns out to be an entertaining, enjoyable evening of bluesy, rootsy country shenanigans.Tonight’s gig rounds off the latest leg of this tour, which was recently disrupted due to a Sutherland vs tourbus steps mishap that saw the singer, actor (and, as we learn, former professional rodeo cowboy) forced to postpone a Read more ...
Ellie Porter
It’s fair to say that things are going pretty well for Denver folk-rockers the Lumineers: Grammys, two platinum-selling albums, huge arena tours, support slots for the likes of U2 and Tom Petty, and the massive boost of having one of their songs (the insanely catchy "Ho Hey") make a memorable appearance in soapy TV country saga Nashville. Now they're back with their much-anticipated third album, III.With III, the Lumineers are really upping their game – and it’s possibly their finest album yet. A harrowing story told in three "acts" of three or four songs apiece, it follows the fictional Read more ...
Ellie Porter
Guns N’ Roses members do love a side project, from Slash’s Snakepit and Conspirators to Axl’s stint as AC/DC frontman. Bass player Duff McKagan has had plenty of them, including hardcore punks 10 Minute Warning, rock 'n' roll supergroup Velvet Revolver and a few months in Stone Temple Pilots – and now he's touring his well-received, country-drenched solo album Tenderness.Tenderness is produced by the very excellent Shooter Jennings (whose country pedigree is impeccable – he’s the son of Waylon Jennings and Jessi Colter), who’s joining McKagan on the road. A black-clad, shades-sporting Read more ...
Owen Richards
As days get shorter and the sun tucks itself behind a blanket of clouds, Whitney return with the bittersweet sound of summer ending. Forever Turned Around is the long-awaited follow up to 2016’s Light Upon the Lake, and the band have lost none of their melodic magic. It is old city soul brought to the hills and forests of the American frontier, and a much welcome break in these trying times.Opener and lead single “Giving Up” shows the band have opted for evolution over revolution. Those trademark falsetto vocals are still there, the horn-led breakdown and uplifting chorus are very on brand. Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
If there's a central motif to the sprawling, 18-track opus that is Taylor Swift’s seventh release - and it’s an album that references both Drake and Springsteen, so it's hard to pin down - it first emerges in track three, the title track. Stripped of pop theatrics, “Lover” trades in what Swift does best: hyper-specific details made universal enough for every first dance, delivered with enough earnestness to rehabilitate a word pulled straight from the headlines of a tabloid magazine. And then, the bridge, delivered with the cadence of a wedding toast: “swear to be overdramatic and true”.While Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
When Johnny Cash and Rick Rubin released the former’s stripped back, soul-bearing American Recordings in 1994 the impact was massive. Not only did it show a way that country music could cross over to a much wider audience, the alt-rock crowd, for want of a better term, it also demonstrated a “pop musician” could reach a career peak at retirement age. Tanya Tucker had her first big hit at 13. She’s already had a longer career than Cash when he released American Recordings and While I’m Livin’, her first album in 17 years, very much succeeds as a similar kind of statement work.Tucker was one of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
With shifts from the crepuscular to the distinct, Dawnbreaker is the aural equivalent of a stygian day periodically lightened when banks of cloud break to allow knife-like sunlight through.The album begins with “Fellows”, where an unadorned acoustic guitar accompanies a cracked solo voice declaring “he gave me his love and I couldn’t give mine.” The atmosphere and sound quality suggest it was rescued from a wax cylinder recording. Next, and bedded by what could be the rhythm box of a Seventies supermarket keyboard, “Gem” swings along, builds and adds instruments, developing into a Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
“We didn’t come all the way from Nashville, Tennessee with just one fiddle,” says Carrie Underwood, halfway through her Glasgow show. The onetime American Idol turned multiple Grammy award-winning country superstar isn’t one for doing things by halves: hers is a show with a big band, big boots, big earrings and her gigantic, arena-filling voice.Despite hints to the contrary (Guns n Roses as her entrance music; feelgood Saturday night southern party anthem “Southbound” as the opening track) a breakneck opening streak hits all the country cliche greatest hits: good girls and casanova cowboys, Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Willie’s new album opens with the singer calling out to all the tired old horses saved from the knackers and put out to pasture. It’s not just something he does in song, but in life. It’s co-written with Sonny Throckmorton, an old mucker of the Zen cowboy who lives next to Nelson’s Luck studio in Texas – and next door, too, to the stud of 60 or so retired horses saved by Nelson from the slaughterhouse and given a retirement home on his ranch. It’s hard not to love a man for that kind of act of kindness to the world’s beasts of burden, and the song’s a good-un, too, sweet, tender, and direct. Read more ...