BJ Barham and River Shook are two of my favorite live acts – whenever they bring their bands through Denver, I’ll cancel pretty much everything else to be there. With both of them releasing albums on the same day – Barham with American Aquarium’s New Ways to Lose, and Shook with their self-titled first solo […]
Willow Avalon Pink Pocket Pistol After introducing her spitfire self to the country music world on last year’s Southern Belle Raisin’ Hell, Willow Avalon is back, not even 18 months later, with another brand-new full-length. And while Southern Belle was a straight-up, modern country record with pop appeal (in a good way), Pink Pocket Pistol […]
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Swamp Dogg Contemplates the Afterlife As he approaches his 84th birthday, Swamp Dogg has run out of time for foolishness. The veteran singer/songwriter’s (aka Jerry Williams, Jr.) 27th album is appropriately titled Swamp Dogg Contemplates the Afterlife. Instead of making a last-ditch effort to pass through the Pearly Gates, though, Williams chooses to focus on […]
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Breakfield In the process of reviewing the self-titled album from Breakfield, I went back to listen to their last record, Dusk, released under their previous name, Boy Named Banjo. Dusk struck me as something released by a band exactly in the place Boy Named Banjo was occupying at the time; sleek, uptempo and likable, perfect […]
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John R. Miller The Great Unknowing It seems obvious, if you think about it – time spent away from home (as it tends to increase for touring musicians) leads to a sense of displacement, of unfamiliarity. On his latest album, John R. Miller has found two highly effective ways of dealing with that displacement – […]
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Bella White A Sign in the Weather Bella White has what I call a hundred-year voice – ancient (by country music standards), yet timeless. That’s her instrument and her gift. What she does with that voice is what makes her music compelling. White’s third full-length album, A Sign in the Weather, follows her from Vancouver […]
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Kurt Vile Philadelphia’s been good to me Kurt Vile seems pretty relaxed in Philadelphia. Well, if you’ve been listening to the reliably laidback indie rocker for a while, you know he seems pretty relaxed just about anywhere. But Philly is what grounds him – he grew up in its suburbs and still lives in the […]
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Thomas Dollbaum “Birds of Paradise” I lived in South Carolina for three years as a young-ish adult (and then in Richmond, Virginia for another eight), but I can’t say that I “get” the South – not truly. But I did grow up in rural America (Upstate New York), with a full view of have-somes and […]
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Nora Kelly Band So Wrong for So Long Do you have a friend – especially, maybe, a divorced kinda friend – who is reentering the world at large by diving headfirst into social media and online dating and such? The new record from Nora Kelly Band, So Wrong for So Long, might be the “slow […]
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Bright Eyes show at Red Rocks in Colorado We are, for better or worse (and, let’s be honest, it’s the worst) reliving the early 2000s. Wars of our own making, a faltering economy, and a leader that’s leading us…where, exactly? With that, though, we’ve at least been able to celebrate some of the best music […]
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