Jason Ringenberg is back, following his 2017 album, Stand Tall, and in top form with a collection of romping rockers. Fueled by his prowling rhythm guitar and his shimmering lead runs, they careen around the corners of social issues, lost […]
There is something deeply moving about the joy and hope that can arise out of pain. While live music has all but disappeared over the last 12 months, recorded music has blossomed. Bands kept writing new music, kept finding unique […]
For longtime fans, it has almost become impossible to remember a time before the sweet sounds of Fruit Bats. Twenty years into Eric D. Johnson’s journey with the Fruit Bats project, his smooth, dreamy melodies still feel so singular and […]
Imagine Aretha Franklin as formidable a guitar player as a vocalist, Sister Rosetta Tharpe if she had jumped all the way across the aisle and stomped the bejeezus out of the gospel, compressing it into pure soul. Despite the heading […]
Do you ever really get over your upbringing? On her first album in nearly a decade, Garrison Starr meets her demons head-on, conducting a full-fledged exorcism as she surveys the psychic damage that left the Mississippi-bred singer “broke in two.” […]
Curtis Salgado is a cool dude. So cool that he was the inspiration for the Blues Brothers, schooling John Belushi in hipness through his R&B record collection while Belushi was shooting Animal House. Salgado and Robert Cray were in a […]
Chris Pierce’s American Silence is one of those albums that truly feels like a lifetime in the making. Pierce tends to play soul music, and has risen to prominence recently with his song “We Can Always Come Back to This” […]
A person could be forgiven for wondering how much is still hidden away in Bob Dylan’s vaults that is worth hearing, and even more to the point, what’s left to say about Dylan’s music that hasn’t been said a thousand […]
It turns out that the pure vocal power and wrenching emotional lyrics of Julien Baker with a full band backing her are just as effective a catharsis in these trying times as the stripped-down version we knew before, when it […]
The dream-like title track of Mando Saenz’s new album, All My Shame, opens with jangly psychedelic guitar strums that halt momentarily to create a distance and an ambivalence that spiral into a hallucinogenic breathlessness as the song climbs toward its […]
