Americana
Owen Richards
Better Oblivion Community Center may be a supergroup of sorts, but the name still draws less recognition that its members (Phoebe Bridgers and Conor Oberst from Bright Eyes). Maybe it’s just too complicated to remember, because a packed Shepherd’s Bush Empire proved the band’s wide appeal – lairy lads and muso pensioners, side-by-side for a night of charm and angst.Oberst and Bridgers have very different voices, but her effortless tones melt through his fragile strains to form a sort of alchemy together. It worked surprisingly well on record, and perhaps more so live. There’s an honesty and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Torso Hell tells the story of an American soldier whose limbs were blown off in Vietnam. Amazingly, he and his buddies survived, and in the ensuing medical chaos his arms and legs were re-attached to them rather than him. The narrator says “At the hospital, it’s so crazy and confused that when these guys come in, the doctors and nurses don’t know what from what … they just start sewing. The main guy stays a torso, but they put his arms and legs back on the other guys. Two guys each get one of his arms … two guys each get one of his legs.” It’s a typically bizarre Terry Allen set-up. Read more ...
joe.muggs
There's a remarkable lightness to the way Norah Jones has glid through her career. She once told theartsdesk that even in her early 20s, faced with the global hyper success of Come Away With Me, “I think I was smart enough to know at the time that it was money in the bank: ‘You can do what you want now, so do it.’” And what she wanted, fantastically, was essentially to be the musician she already was only more so: steadily getting deeper into country melancholy, lounge jazz dreaming and other romantically-lit hinterlands of the American psyche. And now, 17 years on, well Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Guy Clark is among the favourite songwriters of Bob Dylan, a Grammy-winning giant of the so-called outlaw country music movement who lived hard and died of lymphoma in 2016. He made guitars and wrote songs such as the classic “Desperados Waiting for a Train” and “Texas, 1947” which, it has been said, “presents a view of life in post-war West Texas that is as true as Dorothea Lange’s best Dust Bowl portraiture”. Not bad!Clark provided hit records for Ricky Skaggs and Bobby Bare and was a mentor to Rodney Crowell and Steve Earle, who hitchhiked from San Antonio to Nashville in 1974 to meet Read more ...
Liz Thomson
In one of the award-winning club’s forays from its Camden Town home, Green Note welcomed International Women’s Day with a special one-off concert exploring and celebrating the many ages and stages of being a woman. Three generations of musicians were on stage at North London’s JW3. The youngest, The Rosellas, an a cappella trio who met at school and who are now making quite a name for themselves, before shortly dispersing (temporarily one hopes) across the country to uni.It was a life-affirming evening enjoyed by an audience that included a healthy Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Jason Mraz… How can someone so big slip under so many radars. Mine, the muso with whom I trek to all sorts of gigs, and that of a wide range of friends, most of whom are pretty au courant with the scene.Then you hear it. Of course, the big hit – probably on all our mental juke boxes – “I’m Yours”, which has clocked up sales of around 1.4 million, and which comes from his third album, We Sing. We Dance. We Steal Things (2008). The single set what was then a record of 76 weeks in the Billboard Hot 100 chart and peaked at number six, going on to win a Grammy and to be named ASCAP Song of the Read more ...
Liz Thomson
“If you look at music, you see theme, variation, you see symmetry, asymmetry, you see structure,” observed Dave van Ronk, the late folk musician known as “the Mayor of MacDougal Street” in Greenwich Village.He was doubtless talking about composition itself, but it applies also to musical careers. What struck me most watching the last two nights of Joan Baez’s tour in which she bade farewell to the UK was the symmetry of it all. As has been her custom in recent years, she began solo: just her and her bespoke Martin guitar on “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” before introducing “my big band Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“You stop playing for three years and you double your crowd,” jokes Amy Boone at a sold-out gig at the Jazz Café in Camden. The reason for the Delines’ hiatus isn’t much of a joke: Boone was hit by an out-of-control car when walking in a parking lot in Austin, Texas. Both her legs were broken badly, she needed nine major surgeries and a skin graft and spent those years in rehab, delaying the release of the Portland, Oregon band’s acclaimed second album, Imperial. She now walks with an elegant silver cane. And her voice is as haunting, her pacing as impeccable and seemingly effortless, as ever Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Its Dali-esque sleeve image captures Goes West perfectly. Over its 10 instrumental tracks, the music drifts inwards from outside as if introducing the endless open space of an intensely lit desert. There’s a sadness-tinged reflectiveness too; one which could bring on tears and induce a need to look heavenwards for support.Goes West is the fourth solo album from William Tyler, the guitarist in Lambchop and Silver Jews. He’s set his electric guitar aside for this acoustic-bedded set. A full band accompanies him and Bill Frisell guests on the final cut, “Our Lady of the Desert”. John Fahey Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
It’s hard to see the first album under the Pedro the Lion name in 15 years as anything other than a homecoming. There’s the title, Phoenix, for one thing: a dual-purpose nod to both songwriter David Bazan’s hometown and the mythical bird, reborn from the ashes of what came before. There’s the lyrical time traveling to childhood: favourite toys, fickle friends, a litany of street names, fading out like a prayer, at the end of a long desert highway. There’s even, on the relatively upbeat “Clean Up”, a brazen nod of a lyric to the albums under his own name on which Bazan wrestled, to a more or Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Forty years on from her eponymous debut album, the eldest child of Johnny Cash and his first wife Vivian Liberto returns after a near five-year gap from recording with a collection of songs that walk the hyphen of country-rock. Hardly surprising for a musician with such impeccable country credentials who left Nashville for New York.Rosanne Cash’s distinctive voice is to the fore, the band tight, the sound bright and she has some pretty classy company – jazz man Dan Reiser on percussion, and old friends Kris Kristofferson and Elvis Costello who add vocals on “8 Gods of Harlem”, an understated Read more ...
Liz Thomson
In our era of TV so-called talent shows and cynically manufactured stars, how wonderful it is that many of the truly talented musicians who for decades have written the soundtracks of so many lives are releasing late-career albums that can stop you in your tracks. This year has been particularly rich – Joan Baez, Paul Simon, Judy Collins/Stephen Stills – and now David Crosby, with his fourth album in as many years.Here If You Listen finds Croz working once again with Michelle Willis, Becca Stevens and Michael League, all of whom put their individual prints on Lighthouse (2016). The album was Read more ...