Romance and regret weave through Ultan Conlon’s latest album Songs Of Love So Cruel, released in the U.S. this summer. It’s the second full-length release from the Galway-based singer-songwriter, following his 2009 debut Bless Your Heart, and the years between […]
Frankie Lee’s biography paints a picture of a wild kid, an all-American boy from the Midwest who forewent a sports scholarship to make his way across a rambling map of country-rock’s cities of note: Nashville, Los Angeles and Austin, where […]
Nashvillian Andrew Leahey makes earnestly poppy roots-rock driven by ragged-edged, garagey guitar which, combined with the nasal twang of his vocals, earns plenty of comparisons to Tom Petty. The band’s latest, Skyline in Central Time, delivers more of the same, […]
BJ Barham has the kind of voice you trust to sing about the things that dominate his first solo album, Rockingham – a deep, muscular, weathered Southern twang that sounds exactly right on topics like aging and compromise, marriage and […]
Fern Girl and Ice Man is one of two albums released simultaneously by the Lowest Pair, in an apparently bounteous and fertile spring for the bluegrass-influenced duo. The pair’s two previous albums of original material set a bare-bones tone, with […]
Kendl Winter and Palmer T. Lee, the Lowest Pair, doubled down – heh – on their twinning tendencies this spring: their two voices and two banjos appear on two new full-length albums, released at the same time (and recorded in the Twin […]
William Bell’s “You Don’t Miss Your Water,” the rueful heartbreak ballad released as the B-side of his 1961 debut single for Stax Records, introduced one of the most expressive voices in Southern soul: rich, deep, pleading, and promising. His latest […]
The Grammy-winning (and Parents’ Choice award-winning, too) duo the Okee Dokee Brothers have made an utterly charming album for pint-sized buckaroos that, wonder of wonders, will likely not irritate their parents, either. “Saddle Up,” written while the band was on […]
Veteran singer-songwriter Steve Smith fronts the Australian group Fallon Cush, whose hooky, melodic guitar-driven folk-rock veers decisively more toward rock than the folk. Critics frequently invoke fellow Antipodeans Crowded House in describing the band’s poppier outings; also, and perhaps more […]
Highway 14, the state road for which Rod Melancon named his most recent EP, runs along beside the Mississippi border in the southeastern part of Louisiana, the toe of the boot in the boot state. It starts close to Pearl […]
