Pity the young singer/songwriter. His career is always facing the relentless headwind of rarefied troubadour history and the bronze images of Those Who Came Before are evoked as an unreachable benchmark whenever his work is evaluated. His songs are picked apart at a detail that would make Trekkies and Jazz aficionados’ eyes glaze. Yeah, screw [...]
Ray Wylie Hubbard my have been born in Oklahoma, but he will forever be associated with the uniquely peculiar and distinguished title Texas songwriter. Whether he’s throwing off an ironic lark like Up Against the Wall Redneck Mother, which his buddy Jerry Jeff Walker turned into a monster hit in the 70’s – a song [...]
The Internet not only allows this site to exist but it makes discovering bands (and my work) a lot easier. I discovered Mandy Marie and the Cool Hand Lukes after coming across a featured review of their new release $600. Boots over at the the No Depression site (are you a member? You should be) [...]
Richmond, Virginia’s Wrinkle Neck Mules’ fourth studio release Let the Lead Fly finds the band – Andy Stepanian on vocal, guitar, mandolin, Mason Brent on vocal, guitar, mandolin, pedal steel, Brian Gregory on vocal, bass, Stuart Gunter on drums and Chase Heard on vocal, guitar, banjo – strips down their earlier sound resulting in this [...]
The pride of Lindale, Texas continues to defy all expectations. When every other country artist on the chart is a chirpy little blonde singing lines from her 9th grade journal. Lambert, writing or co-writing all but four of the album’s 15 tracks, waves her classic country pride flag but amps it way up instead of [...]
Seattle based artist by way of Alabama and Texas, Lindsay Fuller plumbs the deep, dark well of Southern Gothic narrative and, with the help of her excellent band the Cheap Dates, hauls up a mossy bucket of songs splendid in rich narration and bitter in their wretched fates. Southern Gothic yarns are bleak by design [...]
The Austin Chronicle’s Audra Schroeder reviews Texas’ own honky angel Rosie Flores new Bloodshot Records release Girl of the Century. Rosie is backed by the Pine Valley Cosmonauts led by the Mekons and Waco Brothers’ front man Jon Langford. Rosie and the Pine Valley Cosmonauts recently performed at San Francisco’s Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival, and [...]
To use a threadbare, but in this case useful, musical duality that has fueled decades of heated rock music discussions for (in SAT analogy form) – the Avett Brothers are to the Beatles what the Felice Brothers are to the Rolling Stones. (Sure lots of people like both bands but that’s boring.)
Like the Beatles and [...]
I discovered the Drive By Truckers while an ex-pat Texan living in New York City. The environment that I has always known, and taken for granted, was replaced by something foreign and I was looking for cultural footing to make me feel “at home” but also to reflect my learned redneck attitude, a new framework [...]
It’s Labor Day and I just finished watching Billy Bob Thorton’s contemporary Southern Gothic film Slingblade, so I believe I’m in the perfect frame of mind to review a Chris Knight album.
Knight storytelling style reflects John Prine (who he studied when learning the craft of songwriting) and Steve Earle (who he’s most often inaccurately compared [...]