country
Guy Oddy
Somewhat astoundingly, The Purple Bird is Will Oldham’s album number 21 using his Bonnie “Prince” Billy alias. A fine set of alt country tunes, recorded in Nashville and largely co-written with producer David Ferguson, it also happily suggests that he’s nowhere near the end of his creative journey.Despite many of these tunes being previewed during his headline set at last summer’s Supersonic Festival, this album is not one that has much in common with the likes of Melt Banana, Gazelle Twin or many of the other noise terrorists and experimentalists that normally show their faces there. But Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
'Tis the season for all manner of bugs, colds and illnesses. One had befallen Katy J Pearson, who struck an apologetic note after the night’s first number to say she had been unwell all day and was going to do her best to get through the gig. That added an unexpected element to proceedings, namely by creating the potential for the whole show to come to a sudden halt at any point.Yet Pearson was otherwise unaffected, save for a jokey remark she made about her bodily functions that she just as rapidly quipped she regretted making. She was helped certainly, by a three-piece backing band of heft Read more ...
joe.muggs
This is almost too much to bear. This sprawling 37-track collection begins with the sainted 78-year-old Dolly Parton providing a jaunty spoken narration of her family’s history in music and the church. It’s old-school Disney documentary in tone, but because it’s Dolly you listen, and with her endless countrified charm she tells a story of generations of banjo players and preachers of the Appalachians – and reminds us that these, her forebears, were immigrants.She doesn’t use the word, but just how she talks about the landscapes reminding them of home in England and Wales – in a time when Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Well, seems like only yesterday when I reviewed Willie Nelson’s last album, Borderline, an excellent set from the man’s ninth decade, and now here comes Last Leaf on the Tree, a consummate set that’s at a higher level.It opens with Tom Waits’ title song, with producer and multi-instrumentalist Micah Nelson, Willie’s son, ensuring that Trigger, Nelson’s much-travelled guitar, gets plenty of room to roam. The sound palette is spare, with the limpid clarity of 1990s peaks Spirit or Teatro, and as they are among Nelson’s great albums, that means a lot. It was largely recorded together in a room, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
VINYL OF THE MONTHHannah Scott Absence of Doubt (Fancourt Music)Sometimes a singer comes along who’s not stylistically my thing at all, but their voice has a quality that wrenches, reaches inside, beyond usual taste judgements. For me, a good example would be Kirsty MacColl who, excepting the hits, I came to later in life. There is a similarly direct potency to the voice of Suffolk-raised, London-based singer Hannah Scott. Hers is a crystal-clear instrument, beautiful in the classical sense, words crisply enunciated, but also riven with whatever it is in her life that’s made her who she is. Read more ...
joe.muggs
This record keeps you guessing. It starts off with “Hybrid Romance”, an ambient piece that’s very pretty but has swooping glassy synths that crack and fracture and could easily be about to break into some super jagged Berlin deconstructed club music at any minute.But less than two minutes later and we’re into “Chlorine”, a song in the modern country-inflected pop style which wouldn’t sound out of place on most daytime radio channels, and you could easily imagine the Californian Ded Hyatt performing as a support act for Taylor Swift or Harry Styles.The thing is, though, “Chlorine” has lots of Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Miranda Lambert is one of those country stars who’s massive in the States but no-one’s heard of this side of the Atlantic. Famous since her early twenties, she’s had a quarter century career, encompassing seven Top Five US albums, including one chart-topper, as well as parallel success as part of trio Pistol Annies. But the most she’s troubled the British album charts is reaching No.52 a decade ago. This is a shame as she’s talented and sassy and her new album is a treat.Lambert’s songwriting chops derive from the best country traditions of storytelling, southern wit and chewy wordage, Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Named after the duo’s Woodland Sound Studios in Nashville, badly damaged in a 2020 tornado and restored by them, Woodland Studios is Gillian Welch and David Rawlings’ first album in four years, when All the Good Times won the Grammy for Best Folk Album. It’s their first album of all-original material since Poor David’s Almanack in 2017, and the second to be credited to them as a duo.Its mix of the very traditional-sounding and the strikingly contemporary, evident from the outset as the opener, “Empty Trainload of Sky”, pedal steel making its presence felt before the vocals enter, gives Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
In the world of popular music, tangential connections to success are profile-raising. They offer an immediate connection to an artist. It is beholden on me, then, despite not knowing it when I first enjoyed this album, to mention that rising Grammy Award-winning Americana star Molly Tuttle appears. She is guitarist-vocalist Sullivan Tuttle’s sister. It speaks to the solid pleasures of City of Glass by Santa Cruz quartet AJ Lee & Blue Summit that the song in question, “I Can’t Find You at All”, written by the Tuttles' dad Jack, is not outstandingly ahead of the restSinging mandolin-player Read more ...
David Nice
“Tradition is sloppiness,” Mahler the opera conductor is credited with saying. But in the case of old master John Cox’s long-serving Garsington production of the greatest of operatic comedes, not if it’s refreshed with the subtlest insights in to human tensions and frailties.This time the house’s brilliant director of Strauss masterpieces, Bruno Ravella, who worked as assistant to Cox at the old Garsington in 2005, has been called in to fine-tune a rather wonderful cast, with relative youthfulness among the leads, and serves up a blissful Mozart evening totally in tune with the environment, Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Wow, this is a trip back in time. A visit from "The Man in Black" 21 years after he passed away, just a few months after his beloved wife, June Carter Cash, who stood by him through thick and thin as together they made such beautiful music.I saw him live only once, in the very early 1980s at the annual International Festival of Country Music, a three-day Easter extravaganza at what was then Wembley Arena. Mervyn Conn, the impresario behind the jamboree, was a sleaze bag and tight with his money but boy did he pack that stage with amazing stars! He’d watch over the shows like a Roman emperor, Read more ...
Tim Cumming
At 91, Willie Nelson is about to tour the US with The Outlaws, AKA Minnesota youngster Bob Dylan, 83, the even younger Robert Plant, 75, with Alison Krauss, a mere 52, and 72-year old John Mellencamp (plus a trio of 21st century artists in Celisse, Southern Avenue and Britney Spencer). Willie’s setlist contains songs that are older than some of those artistes, but you can bet a silver dollar that one or two from his excellent new album, The Border, will stray out onto the stage with him and his fabled guitar, Trigger.There’s a wonderful and affecting song here about dreaming of being Read more ...