Noah Berlatsky

Heading towards her second decade as a blues phenomenon, Kansas City guitarist/vocalist Samantha Fish’s Paper Doll (Live at the Bijou) asserts her veteran status with a blast of high-octane grunge.  Over her career, Fish has explored a range of styles, from the country Americana of 2017’s

Fantastic Cat is a sort-of New York City super-group composed of four would be singer-songwriter stars: Anthony D’Amato, Brian Dunn, Don DiLego and Mike Montali (of Hollis Brown). They regularly wear cat masks in photos and readily acknowledge their commercial limitations; the joke is in part

Personal and professional partners Gillian Welch and David Rawlings have been performing minimal, slowed down, dreamy lonesome country folk for some three decades now. The main thing that’s changed since Welch’s string of classic albums — Revival (1995) through The Harrow and the Harvest (2011) — is that the duo

Like Emmylou Harris, Gillian Welch, Alison Krauss, and Iris DeMent before them, the Nashville-based duo Paper Wings mixes coffeehouse folk with old-time and bluegrass — the haunting self-reflective introspection of Joni Mitchell and the haunting high lonesome sound of Bill Monroe. The exact proportion of Mitchell to Monroe

Woody Guthrie’s grandchildren Abe and Annie show up on a couple of tracks on Black Legacy Project, Vol. 1, and that’s a good indication of this album’s roots and approach. The Black Legacy Project was inspired by the Black Lives Matters protests of 2020, but in its