Sign in Become a member

Archive

Various Artists - Badlands: A Tribute To Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska

As memories are sneaky, self-absorbed creatures who often excuse themselves from context in order to join the family photo albums, approaching a tribute album project -- one of nostalgia's natural breeding grounds -- on Bruce Springsteen, it would be tempting to overlook 1982's dark Reagan-era Nebraska

16 Horsepower - Secret South

Speaking with 16 Horsepower frontman David Eugene Edwards earlier this year, two things struck me. The first emerged from comments he made regarding his group's fondness for "old things that have a timeless quality"; both 16HP's typically old-timey, sepia-toned sleeve art and its frequent

Willie Nelson - Milk Cow Blues

From its three years of incubation in Austin through its belated release on Island, this project has carried the generic tag of "Willie Nelson's blues album." The description is accurate as far as it goes. Yet ultimately it is no more helpful in mapping the sophisticated

Various Artists - Arhoolie Records 40th Anniversary Collection 1960-2000

You can have your recording studio, give me a field recorder any day of the week. Take the high technology and the complex sounds sculpted by sonic scientists in the hermetically sealed engineer's booth and on the sanitary hard drive, take 'em on down to the river

Van Morrison & Linda Gail Lewis - You Win Again

Linda Gail Lewis, never really a star singer in her own right, remembered almost exclusively for duets with her incendiary older sibling Jerry Lee, has been way off the charts in the United States for a long time. But she can pump a mean, mean piano in the Lewis boogie

Drive-By Truckers - Alabama Ass Whuppin'

Not that they were ever a shy and retiring bunch, but when the Drive-By Truckers first started visiting my neck of the North Carolina woods four years ago, their shows did have the random pedal steel-calmed moment. These days you'll find frontguy Patterson Hood, under a truckstop cap

Jon Wayne - Two Graduated Jiggers

It's been fifteen years since Jon Wayne released the infamous cult album Texas Funeral. Drunken, comic, brilliant and thoroughly dedicated to the Lone Star State in songs such as "Texas Wine", "Texas Cyclone" and "Texas Jailcell", the album was country of the