country
Kieron Tyler
A sticker on the cover of American Dust is says it’s “an ode to the beauty of the American Southwest,” specifically the High Desert area within the wider setting of California's Mojave Desert. North-East of Los Angeles, this region contrasts with the city’s urban and suburban sprawl by incorporating scattered settlements.Eve Adams lived in Los Angeles. Now resident in the High Desert, this landscape is primary to her fourth album. In contrast with its title and inspiration, American Dust is not a desiccated rumination on the impact of remoteness with sparse arrangements and instrumentation. Read more ...
Joe Muggs
This is a weird one: I do try and stay on top of pop culture, but for several years, Ethel Cain completely passed me by. You’d think I would have noticed a gothic bisexual Baptist trans woman achieving great enough success to be championed by Barack Obama, but no – until streaming algorithms put me on to her record Perverts, released earlier this year. It’s an incredible work of fathomlessly deep ambient and drone music, and I was baffled to see something so out-there clocking up millions upon millions of views, until I finally clocked her previous success. Though Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Molly Tuttle is a star of the US bluegrass scene whose last couple of albums have broadened her appeal. On them she wandered into country, folk, and rock. She featured the likes of Gillian Welch, Dave Matthews and Old Crow Medicine Show, intimating, perhaps, a desired trajectory.Her latest album, her fifth solo, tones down these tendencies in favour, much of the time, of a gentler, smoother direction. While it doesn’t imitate Taylor Swift, there’s something of that superstar’s pop-country style and relationship lyricism.“Mistakes, bad dates, man, I’ve had a few/Cheap thrills, bitter pills, I Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The best-selling single so far this year in the UK is Californian singer Alex Warren’s “Ordinary”. It stayed at the top of the charts longer than any song this decade. If you’re not familiar, imagine the lyrical mood and production of Hosier’s “Take Me to Church” filtered through the bombast of early Bastille, and supercharged with Warren’s Christian faith and love for “worship music”. The rest of his album is equally overblown and icky.At the start of the 1960s, one of the twists that made pop blossom to greatness was gospel singers applying their craft to secular love songs. In the 2020s Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Tami Neilson’s career is long and storied. The short version is that she began with a 1990s Canadian family band (opening for Kitty Wells, aged 10!), moved to New Zealand and became a country star there, then, over the last decade, has been “discovered by" and worked with all manner of US artists, ranging from Ashley McBryde to Willie Nelson. Her latest album is named in honour of the signage on Nashville Broadway, “the patron saint of heartbreak in downtown”, as she puts it. Less cheekily characterful than her output of recent years, it still has much to recommend it.Where her last album, Read more ...
Tami Neilson
I was born Tamara Lee Neilson. I had an Uncle Kenny and an Aunt Dolly (who played guitar and banjo, respectively). I mean, did I really have a choice to become anything but a Country singer?I fell in love with Dolly Parton when I was six years old, spinning her records on my dad’s record player while dancing on the olive green shag carpet of our living room. At 10 years old, I opened for Kitty Wells, the Queen of Country Music and the first woman to ever have a number one hit on Country radio, with my family band, The Neilsons. I knew I wanted to be like these women when I grew up; wear Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Mark Morton is best known as a guitarist with US metallers Lamb of God. They’ve been going for three decades, established and successful, at the more extreme, thrashier end of the spectrum, but still achieving Top Five albums on the Billboard charts.He’s also been developing a solo career. His debut, 2019’s Anesthetic, was straightforward heavy rock, featuring names such as Mark Lanegan and Chester Bennington, but his follow-up is more interesting, a riff-tastic dive into southern boogie, tipping its hat to The Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd.There are guests throughout again, but this Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
On the cover of her eponymous debut album, the Bolton-raised Toria Wooff reclines on a church pew located in Stanley Palace, a 16th-century mansion in her adopted city of Chester. In her hand, a Celtic Cross. Such imagery implies that what will be heard on the grooves within the sleeve might cleave to forms of gothic-inclined British folk. This, though, is not the case.It’s clear from the album’s second track that Wooff is aware of dark Texas country singer-songwriter Townes Van Zandt. “Lefty's Motel Room” is an open nod to his totemic composition "Pancho and Lefty.” As Wooff’s song picks up Read more ...
Joe Muggs
America – the pro-wrestling-ass nation, the ultimate society of the spectacle – famously likes things big, and modern country and western music has gone along with that. Big hats, big trucks, big sentiment, big pop production, very big sales indeed, and not a lot in the way of subtlety. But country also has a parallel history, of course: as music of the little guy, the theatre of the domestic, a place for preservation of simple folk traditions in the face of the overwhelming scale of modernity. And it’s into this that through this century the Alabaman singer-songwriter Jason Isbell, whether Read more ...
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 ...