“The Music Man,” the lead single from the new David Ramirez, opens with an ode to the Walkman. Ramirez describes his younger self—innocent, free of existential dread—blindsided by mind-altering wonder when his dad gave him one. “The wheels began […]
The new Jason Boland and the Stragglers album closes with an image right out of Steinbeck: “Lonesome travelers and rambling types / shuffling down some unknown trail tonight,” Boland sings in “Buffalo Return,” penned by late Oklahoma songwriter Jimmy […]
Somewhere in his native South Carolina, the Oregon-based Cuchulain—who makes music under that mononym—met his someone special. Still fresh-faced and young, they stayed up late all summer, getting wasted to college radio: “Rolled in the grass in late July […]
EDITOR’S NOTE: Chris Acker’s Famous Lunch came out on Oct. 11 on Gar Hole Records. We’re reviewing it now as part of a year-end round up of some of the best albums we missed along the way this year. On […]
If Sleater-Kinney and David Bowie wrote a song in the Arizona desert, the result might sound like Hataałii’s “Something’s in the Air.” “Hand in hand should see it through / Oh, I got some news for you,” Hataałii sings over […]
Yarn’s latest, Born, Blessed, Grateful & Alive, opens with grand, sweeping blues rock and an imperative: get off that screen and join the party. The music, the message to “Turn Off the News,” neither are all that radical, but that’s […]
Boy Golden makes weightless music in heavy times. “Untitled,” the closing track of his new album, For Eden, documents the weightlessness of youth: of drinking in the same three bars, serving drinks for a living, playing local shows, looking forward […]
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. […]
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 […]
Teenagers are basically just giant toddlers. Usually we say this with a chuckle. It helps us wrap our heads around the baffling, illogical things teenagers say and do (or forget to do … ). Will Hoge, however, sees the toddler […]
