When a veteran band with a revolving door membership regroups for its first studio release in five years, you hardly expect music as fresh, focused and richly satisfying as Paging Mr. Proust (out April 29 on Thirty Tigers). Rather than playing […]
After Billy Bragg, Wilco, and a host of others have already rifled the Woody Guthrie notebooks, pickings might seem slim for this Del McCoury project. Yet Del and Woody (released April 15 on McCoury Music) finds common ground for the […]
Provocative and polarizing, lush with strings and blaring with horns, A Sailor’s Guide to Earth (out April 15 on Atlantic) finds Sturgill Simpson entrusting the musical adventurism of his third album to a heavy-handed producer. The producer is named Sturgill […]
The party’s over. Lovers and Leavers (out April 8 on Thirty Tigers) is the fifth album from the former honky-tonk wunderkind, and it marks a departure from everything that has preceded it. It is his first release in five years, his […]
Robbie Fulks is a funny guy. Though he emerged a couple of decades ago as the smartest smart-aleck in Americana — his bluegrass and country formalism subverted by his lethal lyrical humor — you could sense that he might have […]
After Parker Millsap flashed plenty of promise on his 2014 debut, this supercharged sophomore effort ups the ante on every level. The Very Last Day (out March 25 on Thirty Tigers/Okrahoma) combines the apocalyptic vision and thematic depth that its […]
The title of the latest album (out March 16) from Grant-Lee Phillips comes from the lyrics of “Moccasin Creek,” one of the evocatively detailed songs that shows his music benefitting from such a tight focus. Phillips’ previous work has often had […]
Almost two decades since the untimely death of Jeff Buckley, the law of diminishing returns has definitely asserted itself. If You and I (out March 11) hasn’t scraped the bottom of the posthumous barrel, it comes pretty close. The latest […]
On the aptly-titled Family, Friends & Heroes (out March 4 on Compass Records), mandolinist Frank Solivan shows why one of the rising stars in bluegrass circles deserves a higher profile in the wider world of Americana. The leadoff track alone […]
Both his personality and the signature musical style of Allen Toussaint — the two are inseparable — reflect such refinement, grace and subtle whimsy that the soggy tale of his evacuation from his native New Orleans seems as incongruous as […]
