The title of Jim Lauderdale’s new album is just right. On My Favorite Place, his 37th album, the ambassador of Americana has settled into his musical comfort zones: western swing, rockabilly, country weepers, bluegrass rambles, and folk ballads. He’s enjoying […]
“No problem! Only solution! Love riot!” exclaims the irrepressible Cody Dickinson near the end of Homemade, summing up this supremely satisfying album quite nicely. On his first solo outing, the co-pilot (along with brother Luther) of Americana mainstays North Mississippi […]
Jenny Don’t must have gotten tangled up in Wanda Jackson’s DNA somewhere along the line. Cowpunkery is Don’t’s advertised stock-in-trade, but Jackson’s rockabilly heart bleeds into her music like a busted artery squirting in all directions. For her latest, Broken […]
The Complete Friends of Old Time Music Concert by Bessie Jones, John Davis, and the Georgia Sea Island Singers with Mississippi Fred McDowell and Ed Young opens with legendary ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax’s assurances that integration and world peace were imminent. […]
The title of Ecuadorian-Swiss band Hermanos Gutiérrez’s new album translates to “cosmic sound.” It’s a bit literal for the type of moody, cross-cultural, instrumental music that the band makes, but the name also seems to capture something deeper, more spiritual […]
Gangstagrass’ The Blackest Thing on the Menu is a summer record. It hearkens back to the late ’90s, when a certain music reviewer was a teenager. It sounds like speeding aimlessly down country roads in a rusted old hatchback, windows […]
Double albums traditionally signal a newly ambitious and confident band, be it historical landmarks like The Beatles’ White Album and The Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street or a more modern example like Big Thief’s Dragon New Warm Mountain I […]
One of the best albums of 2022 was a low-key debut, Bummer Year, that came from Austin-based quartet Good Looks, but you’d have been lucky to catch them on tour. Shortly after their hometown album release show that spring, the […]
Even without the historical significance behind its creation, the release of Earl Jam: A Tribute to Earl Scruggs is cause for celebration. Tony Trischka, the driving force behind the project, is an award-winning banjo master himself who has always acknowledged […]
“Milonga Accidental,” the song that won singer-songwriter Alisa Amador the 2022 NPR Tiny Desk Contest and is the closing track on her fantastic debut album, Multitudes, encapsulates both the self-evident promise — and breathtaking vulnerability — that makes her music […]
