Corbie Hill

The new Jason Boland and the Stragglers album closes with an image right out of Steinbeck: “Lonesome travelers and rambling types / shuffling down some unknown trail tonight,” Boland sings in “Buffalo Return,” penned by late Oklahoma songwriter Jimmy LaFave. “In your hobo jungles and your boxcar dreams / living only by

Somewhere in his native South Carolina, the Oregon-based Cuchulain—who makes music under that mononym—met his someone special. Still fresh-faced and young, they stayed up late all summer, getting wasted to college radio: “Rolled in the grass in late July / we watched the dance of the fireflies,

EDITOR'S NOTE: Chris Acker's Famous Lunch came out on Oct. 11 on Gar Hole Records. We're reviewing it now as part of a year-end round up of some of the best albums we missed along the way this year. On “Cursive Proverbs,” from

If Sleater-Kinney and David Bowie wrote a song in the Arizona desert, the result might sound like Hataałii’s “Something’s in the Air.” “Hand in hand should see it through / Oh, I got some news for you,” Hataałii sings over the track’s propulsive pep. “Sometimes life ain’

Yarn’s latest, Born, Blessed, Grateful & Alive, opens with grand, sweeping blues rock and an imperative: get off that screen and join the party. The music, the message to “Turn Off the News,” neither are all that radical, but that’s not the point. It feels good — full stop.

Boy Golden makes weightless music in heavy times. “Untitled,” the closing track of his new album, For Eden, documents the weightlessness of youth: of drinking in the same three bars, serving drinks for a living, playing local shows, looking forward into the great expanse of future. Boy Golden — aka Canadian