Nashville
Adam Sweeting
Since Nashville and country music are one giant soap opera, it's amazing nobody turned Tennessee's Music City into a TV series before. No matter. Here we are with series two, and it's as deliriously cheesy and melodramatic as ever.The first series ended with veteran country star Rayna James (Connie Britton) and her alcoholic guitarist/former lover Deacon Claybourne hurtling into a cataclysmic car crash. Series two opened amid the wreckage and the squeaking of tortured metal, with flashbacks to when Deacon and Rayna were young and in lurve (bravo for a splendid decades-rewinding job by the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Eddie Noack: Psycho – The K-Ark and Allstar Recordings 1962–69Eddie Noack’s 1968 single “Psycho” was virtually unknown until Elvis Costello released his cover version in 1981. By that time, Noack had been dead for three years. After its resurrection “Psycho” was recognised as one of the strangest songs ever. Although musically it is straight, George Jones-styled country, in its lyrics an unrepentant killer describes his actions to his mother – whom he had just killed. There was no redemption, no punishment, no pay off. Just the cold refrain “You think I’m psycho, don’t you mama?”“Psycho”, Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Nashville’s singer, songwriter, luthier and hard liver Guy Clark delivered one of the best country albums of the Noughties, 2009’s Somedays the Song Writes You. Sporting the likes of "Hemingway’s Whiskey", "The Guitar" and "Maybe I Can Paint Over That", it ranked with the best he’s done. Four years later, the world must be a darker place for Clark following the death of his wife Suzanne. Nor is he well enough to tour. We’ll not get the chance to see him in the UK again. And that, considering the strength of these new songs, is enough to make you weep.The album is cowritten with a variety of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
A renaissance man from Texas? Hell yeah. Loosely pegged as "country singer" when he struck out for Nashville in the late Seventies, where he survived on a series of odd jobs before landing himself a songwriting job with a music publisher, the mature Steve Earle has blossomed creatively in all directions. Were he to use business cards, which I can't imagine somehow, he could justifiably bill himself as singer, songwriter, actor, playwright, novelist and political activist.He made a brilliant start with his first full-length album Guitar Town (1986), a scintillating mix of rockabilly, country, Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
She has yet to hit the second half of her twenties, but Caitlin Rose already has a voice to melt the heart of the most casual listener. While her pedigree - Nashville-born daughter of a Grammy-winning songwriter - screams country starlet, Rose’s vocal is instead the rich, melodic croon to match the torch singer coyness of the pose she pulls on the cover art to her second album.The songwriting may be simple and the vocals straight from a Patsy Cline record, but Rose’s work is about as old-fashioned as the whisky cocktail. Wurlitzer organ, pedal steel and a horn section get used strategically, Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Usually that “similarity to persons living or dead is purely coincidental” note at the end of a broadcast is a mere formality - but I can’t have been the only person to react with a start when a trio of shady record company execs referred to Juliette Barnes, Hayden Panettiere’s perky blonde future of country music, as “the number one crossover artist in the country”.Mind you, I did spend more time listening to Taylor Swift’s chart-topping album Red last year than is really healthy, or socially acceptable, for a grown-up woman. It’s pretty hard to reconcile the all-American sweetheart who Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
In a members-only bowling club, down a side street in a residential part of Glasgow I'd never visited before last night, Texan fiddle-player and songwriter Amanda Shires stood wearing the most magnificent pair of cowboy boots I had ever seen.They were a well-worn grey, decorated with the same f-shaped slots as her own instrument, and complete with giant silver buckles that made a satisfying jingle like heavy-duty sleigh bells when she stamped her feet hard enough to be her own backing track. They remind me of a shop sign I saw in Nashville once, offering "two free" when you bought one pair of Read more ...
Tim Cumming
He has been called “America’s sharpest musical storyteller” by Rolling Stone, and has enough talent to give Bob Dylan’s talking blues a run for their money. The East Nashville-based singer-songwriter, guitarist, yarn-spinner, troubadour and amiably agnostic stoner has 10 new stories on his 14th album, the title of which acts as a pretty accurate calling card for the Snider experience: Agnostic Hymns and Stoner Fables. He’s also got a raw new band behind him, at the same time as strapping on an electric guitar, blowing a mean, distorted harp through a handheld mic, and delivering some of the Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
“I know what I was angry about when I wrote this,” Nanci Griffith told the crowd as she introduced “Hell No (I’m Not Alright)”, “but you can get your anger out about whatever you want.”It seemed a little odd that Griffith left the big hook (if the bold, sloganned t-shirts of the crowd are anything to be believed) from new album Intersection until after the house lights came back up for the first time, but back in her native America the song can lead to pandemonium. Delivered with gusto, complete with synchronised clapping from two burly roadies in matching sunglasses, its lyrics are not Read more ...
graeme.thomson
I last saw Dan Auerbach and Pat Carney’s primitive garage blues duo a little under four years ago, touring their sixth album Attack & Release. Truth be told, I found them slightly heavy going. Big riffs, big drums, back-of-a-beer mat lyrics and not much else. Heard one, heard 'em all. My, but they’ve grown. Or, at least, their audience has. After a decade’s hard graft and eight albums, The Black Keys are suddenly a very big deal indeed. They play three sold-out nights at Alexandra Palace next week, while tickets for a forthcoming show at Madison Square Garden were snapped up within Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The makers of this short history of country music had done a good job of rounding up interviewees, who included such veterans as Ray Price, Merle Haggard and Charley Pride alongside the offspring of several country legends. We met Shooter Jennings (son of Waylon), Hank Williams III and Georgette Jones (daughter of Tammy Wynette and George Jones). Trouble is, by the time their interviews had been diced into small fragments and lobbed in with an additional list of pundits and critics, their impact had dissipated.The solution? This should either have been a longer film or the first of two (or Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Nick Lowe is truly the Zelig of rock. The erstwhile son-in-law of Johnny Cash, a pivotal figure in the history of punk and pub rock. Recently I was watching a DVD of the David Essex movie Stardust – there are worse guilty pleasures – and up popped the Damned’s one-time producer Basher Lowe doing a blink-and-he's-off cameo. But never mind the past. At the ripe age of 62 he has made a damn fine record, full of simple, plaintive melodies and, most of all, lyrics that slice into the very core of being human and having feelings.I recently reviewed the new album by Bombay Bicycle Club and had no Read more ...