This week’s 17th edition of WXPN’s Non-COMMvention drew hundreds of programmers, managers, publicists, and a variety of Triple A (Adult Album Alternative) radio and music insiders from across the US. The iconic Philadelphia station, which is the home of the […]
With last year’s release of their sixth studio album, Shouted, Written Down & Quoted, Greensky Bluegrass emerged from the pack of their improvisational brethren with one of the best records of the year, jamgrass or other. It’s a record that […]
It’s been four and half years since Hoots and Hellmouth’s last record, 2012’s promising but uneven Salt. In that time, songwriter Sean Hoots was able to take a much needed sabbatical from the relentless touring that defined the band through […]
I was still steaming a couple of songs into Jeffrey Foucault’s show at Steel City Coffeehouse in Phoenixville, PA Friday night. My wife had unexpectedly run late getting home, causing me to pace and stomp around and throw up my […]
About the time Woody Guthrie would have been singing lullabies to his daughter Nora, a preteen Del McCoury was sitting in a pew at the Missionary Baptist Church listening to his mom and dad sing. Occasionally, when she got a […]
When I heard Kill County’s new record, Broken Glass in the Sun, earlier this year — the space of it, the beauty of it — I was gutted. I was grieving the sudden and horrible death of a too-young family […]
Photo credit: Bob Sweeney Actor-scientists passed Geiger counters over the heads of the first few rows of early arrivers. Yellow-slickered field researchers combed through the entrails of sacrificed audience cassette tapes in a 15’ fan-boat parked in the middle of […]
Langhorne Slim & the Law pulsate from the first notes of their new album, The Spirit Moves. The frantic bass drum kick of the opening title track sets the tone of an artist trying to get it all in: banjo and […]
On most spring days in 1925, my grandfather rode his swayback mare from his family’s cabin along the Little River across the Alum Ridge to the Stony Point school, a one-room schoolhouse on the road to Copper Valley. Not far […]
Okay, so full disclosure: I started out to write a review of Della Mae’s June 11 show at suburban Philadelphia’s Ardmore Music Hall that would be completely devoid of the most common descriptor of the band over their first three albums: […]
