After a five-year album break, the indie rock heroes of The Hold Steady return with a pummeling confidence and reach back to glory days right at the top of their seventh LP with “Denver Haircut,” a focused story song about […]
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As this strange decade veers to a close, it will be remembered for the extent to which we’ve been bound by omnipresent digital chains and the bad habits they enable. Scrolling, scanning, linking, liking. We’re so often some place other […]
When does earnest musicianship and exuberant joy billow over into straining grandiosity and sonic overreach? How many layers are too many layers? And when should a performer perhaps cool it with the strings? When an artist sincerely aims for a […]
The multi-instrumentalist and singer-songwriter Andrew Bird creates little worlds over the arcs of his albums. His records are miniature places of possibility. On his latest, My Finest Work Yet on Loma Vista Recordings, Bird conjures up images of old movies, […]
From the top, the discerning listener knows that Julian Lage’s Love Hurts is not a pedestrian jazz guitar album. For starters, Lage — accompanied on this deep 43-minute effort by drummer Dave King and bassist Jorge Roeder — layers droney […]
A classic still-life image –a painting of a bowl of fruit – hangs on the wall above Toronto singer-songwriter Doug Paisley on the cover of Starter Home, his new record. He’s sitting in what appears to be a typical living […]
The cover art to The Bottle Rockets’ Bit Logic LP features an 8-bit outlaw. He’s a mid-1980s, hyper-pixelated Wild West rebel, the stuff of vintage Reagan-era Nintendo Entertainment System consoles. He’s the perfect figure for the Missouri outfit’s latest outing: Twelve […]
The five least-surprising words in American roots music? “Willie Nelson’s new studio album.” This phrase, which plainly and accurately describes My Way in the album’s accompanying press materials, is a sure bet, the recording industry’s epitome of reliability and – […]
A nation of immigrants. One at odds with itself about present and future, without ever mustering the time or energy to reconcile past horrors. That’s America 2018, although David Olney is a savvy enough writer and performer to make his […]
The rolling bars of piano licks. A brief, but striking, high-octave guitar note. This is the stuff of rockabilly lore, or, at the top of one late summer release, history meeting modern times. Then comes the opening lyrical salvo. “I’m […]
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