Brian Burns - The Eagle & The Snake: Songs Of The Texians
Over the years, Dallas songwriter Brian Burns has built a quiet but impressive career as a Lone Star honky-tonker with a sensitive streak. On his third collection, The Eagle & The Snake: Songs Of The Texians, he has combined his skills in an attempt to tell the history (and future)
ALBUM REVIEW: Lambchop - 'Is A Woman'
Their sixth album in eight years finds Lambchop finding ever more intricate tapestries in their luxuriously unfolding music. With Is A Woman, the band reached for and has achieved a new level of intimacy.
Love and beauty are the substance of both the songs and the sound. Kurt Wagner'
Hank Williams Jr. - Almeria Club
Hank Williams Jr.'s artistic collapse is among country music's most embarrassing stories, not least of all for its excruciating duration. More than twenty years have passed since Whiskey Bent And Hell Bound, the last of his remarkable 1970s recordings that fused honky-tonk, blues, Southern rock, and
Billy Bragg & The Blokes - England, Half English
In a sense, the most interesting phase of the Mermaid Avenue project is still unfolding. Up to now, we've been hearing what Wilco and Billy Bragg did to Woody Guthrie by reviving his dormant songs. Now that the principals have moved on, we get to hear the other
Byrds - The Preflyte Sessions
Pieced together from work tapes and demos made with Jim Dickson at Sam Cooke's World Pacific Studios in 1964, this is the most complete portrait yet of the band that would become the Byrds. Musicians and hard-core Byrd watchers have prized long-out-of-print vinyl releases of many of these
Uncle Tupelo - 89-93: An Anthology
More than a decade, now, since an old friend at Waterloo Records started raving about a new album they'd just gotten at the store. Roscoe was probably the world's biggest Replacements fan (that was his bootleg cassette they swiped and disseminated as The Shit Hits The