country
Thomas H. Green
“It was the night before Christmas and all through the house not a creature was sober, especially my spouse.” So runs the giggly spoken word opening line of “Harlan County Coal”, the third song on Hell of a Holiday by American country trio Pistol Annies. A semi-rock number, it insists the titular lump of combustible sedimentary rock is what the man in each of their lives will receive if he doesn’t straighten up his act.This cheerfully sassy woman-powered attitude permeates the album… well, the parts that aren’t Jesus-lovin’ or simply old fashioned Christmas cheese.Pistol Annies are big in the Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Adams has long been Robert Plant’s guitarist in bands including the Sensational Space Shifters, as well as working with fellow Space Shifter Juldeh Camara in the band JuJu. He is steeped in American Blues as well as its West African and Desert Blues roots, having worked as a producer for Rachid Taha and on some of Tinariwen’s finest albums. More recently, he has produced and performed with the outrageously energetic southern Italian Taranta band, Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino, and it’s from that collaboration that this new set with CGS’s violinist and percussionist, Mauro Durante, stems.They Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Jason Isbell is a bigger noise on the other side of the Atlantic than he is in the UK but his last three albums have, nonetheless, bothered the middle-regions of the British album charts. He’s built a critically lauded career with his band The 400 Unit since leaving Drive-By Truckers a decade-and-a-half ago, merging country with rock and various southern US styles. His latest is a covers album benefit for three non-profit social justice organizations, including Black Lives Matter, and is, he says, a celebration of Georgia “turning blue” (voting Democrat) in last year’s US election. Happily it Read more ...
Tim Cumming
As The Rolling Stones – sans a much-missed Charlie Watts – generate old fashioned, 20th-century rock'n'roll excitement in the stadiums of north America this autumn, their final great studio album, 1981’s Tattoo You, returns to the new releases shelf after 40 years. It's available in a range of editions, from the standard single remastered album through a deluxe double set that comes with a disc of “Lost and Found” outtakes, to a “super-deluxe” four-disc boxed set encompassing a hardback book and the band’s live performance from the second of two dates at Wembley, on 26 July 1982.The Wembley Read more ...
joe.muggs
Lil Nas X is good at being a pop star. Like, what could pop culture need more than a young, flamboyant, witty gay rapper from the deep south who can top the US country charts then just when it appeared he might not be able to live up to the success of “Old Town Road” lap dance Satan in the video for the Latin-tinged “Call me by Your Name” and storm to mega sales all over again? He is in many ways the culmination of the deconstruction of hip hop machismo, being from a generation that grew up on the dweebiness of Drake, the thoughtfulness of Kendrick Lamar, the camp of Nicki Minaj, the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The presence of Nashville’s Erin Rae and Caitlin Rose on guest vocals suggests Spencer Cullum's Coin Collection could be a take on country music. Indeed, the album was recorded in Nashville and Cullum has contributed pedal steel to live shows and records by A-grade Music City star Miranda Lambert. However, Cullum has also played on records by Herman Dune and Kesha. His first solo album sounds nothing like a product of Nashville.Cullum is British and has been based in Nashville for close to a decade. His work as a session player has been stellar; he’s been on stage with Dolly Parton. Coin Read more ...
Guy Oddy
It’s almost 25 years since Alabama 3 unleashed their “sweet, pretty country acid house gospel music” on an unsuspecting world with Exile on Coldharbour Lane – one of the finest records of the late 20th Century. 12 albums later and with their first since 2016’s Blues, the band are still very much rooted in a world of urban weirdos and misfits, and this is all to the good.Step 13 is a largely up tempo, toe-tapping antidote to a Covid-damaged, post-Brexit Britain that doesn’t shy away from commenting on the political landscape, but nor does it hammer Alabama 3’s views down anyone’s throat either Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Saunders' Ferry Lane” elegantly paints a picture of revisiting an empty, out-of-season neighbourhood to reflect on an old relationship. It’s cloudy and begins raining. The grass where the couple lay is dead. Birds have flown away. The gentle arms which held the narrator are gone. “I find no present comfort for my pain” sings a forlorn Sammi Smith. Swelling strings darken the mood, as does a plaintive pedal steel.Discomfort of a different kind is addressed by Billie Jo Spears’ up-tempo “Mr Walker, It's All Over.” After leaving Garden City, Kansas for New York to work, she fetches coffee for Read more ...
joe.muggs
Scottish singer-songwriter Dorothy Allison pretty much defines cool. Her band One Dove was the first to snare Andrew Weatherall as producer after his success with Screamadelica, and together they created Morning Dove White: an extraordinary album that fused country and western melancholy with deep dub and electronica. It brought extraordinarily grown up emotion to the rave generation and creating the archetypal comedown soundtrack to the devoted few who loved it.Since then she’s worked with everyone from Massive Attack to Paul Weller, Death In Vegas to Pete Doherty (he used to be talented and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Karen Black’s connection with music was never hidden. In Robert Altman’s 1975 film Nashville she played a country singer. In 1970’s Five Easy Pieces she was a would-be country singer. In Nashville, two of the songs she sang were self-penned. She also dueted with Kris Kristofferson in 1972’s Cisco Pike.Hollywood logic usually dictates that an actor with musical inclinations – however shaky – issues a record. Hence releases by William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, Peggy Lipton, Annette Funicello and a million more. Yet nothing from the evidently musically capable Karen Black. (In 1965, there had Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Harry Grafton (b. 1978) is the preferred title of Henry Fitzroy, 12th Duke of Grafton, custodian of Euston Hall in Suffolk and the man behind the Red Rooster Festival. The latter, during its six pre-COVID years of existence, built a reputation for presenting fresh, fiery and exciting American roots music. All being well, it returns this August. Grafton started in the music business in the early years of this century in Nashville, Tennessee, where he also had a radio show. His Stateside sojourn culminated in a job on the Rolling Stones global A Bigger Bang Tour. Upon the death of his father in Read more ...
joe.muggs
Lambchop leader Kurt Wagner has suggested that the title of this album is semi literal: that he wanted to write “something akin” to classic, Great American Songbook show tunes, rather than his usual country-tinged style. If so, it’s for a rather gloomy sort of a show. At the beginning, it does suggest you’re going to get some high drama: the rather Leonard Cohen-ish “A Chef’s Kiss” would certainly fit in a middle of a musical in the “how did I get here, where will I go?” bit where the protagonist is alone in the spotlight on a blank stage. But where you might expect such a number to pick up Read more ...