Corbie Hill

Sometimes a sketch is enough. John Vincent III’s “More than Alive” is little more than acoustic guitar and gentle vocals. There’s a little fretless bass here, some effected guitar ambience there, but the song itself is as sparse as the Texas road it takes place upon and as

“Tomorrow” dawns gradually. In another context, the tambourines and patient three-count drums would give this Black Pumas slow burner an R&B slow dance feel, but a phaser-soaked electric guitar pulls it toward ’70s psychedelia while sparse synth bass bursts pull it toward Radiohead. “All I want to do

Some songwriters write short stories. Some write anthems. Some write life itself. “My friend had a Twin / I had some old no-name Strat,” John R. Miller sings on the gentle, finger-picked “Basements” on his new album, Heat Comes Down. “Our drummer’s dad was cool / he let us come over

For many people, their late 20s and early 30s are a messy time. The type of messy — job, love, family, spirituality, overindulgence — is almost immaterial. It’s the overwhelming sense that they should have their footing by now. Life goes one way, but things seem to be moving in another.

“Those ’70s and ’80s blues men took on these Black stereotypes and made this new stereotype of bad, ‘your uncle’s band in a garage’ blues music,” Carl “Buffalo” Nichols told David Browne in a 2022 Rolling Stone story. “It’s already been so far removed from anything recognizable from

Halfway through Turnpike Troubadours’ A Cat in the Rain we meet a cowboy. He rides among backcountry aspens, lost in thought. He was younger, wilder once, for which he’s paid dearly. “I don’t miss the taste of liquor / or really anything about it, but / The temporary shelter was