Craig Finn is a master of the short story. In three and half minutes he can tell you more than most people tell you in a lifetime. On I Need A New War, Finn concludes a trilogy of music that…
Album | Craig Finn – I Need A New War
Author: Bob Fish
Album | Carrie Tree – The Canoe
Gentle graces. There is something essentially soft and tender about Carrie Tree’s latest record, The Canoe. Underneath the placid exterior are musical depths one doesn’t always associate with folk music, instruments like balafon, ronroco, ngoni, and jarana. Allow the music…
Album | Daniel Norgren – Wooh Dang
Daniel Norgren is an anomaly. If you close your eyes and listen to a song like ‘Let Love Run The Game’, you’d almost swear it was The Band, but with an unidentifiable vocalist. The music choogles along, sounding like something…
Album | Field Medic – fade into the dawn
Life gets messy and Field Medic embraces the mess in all its rambunctious, unruly glory. Recorded digitally, fade into the dawn sounds nothing like your standard digital album, largely because Kevin Patrick Sullivan decided to record each song in a…
Album | Swimming Bell – Wild Sight
Lovely and strange is the perfect way to describe Wild Sight, the debut album from Swimming Bell. Enthralling vocals layered one upon another combine with simple instrumentation, treated to create otherworldly blends unlike virtually anything else. Katie Schottland, who records…
Album | Ratso – Stubborn Heart
Larry ‘Ratso’ Sloman has the kind of curriculum vitae that most writers would kill for. Scribe for Rolling Stone, author of On The Road With Bob Dylan, co-writer of memoirs for Howard Stern, Anthony Kleidis, and Mike Tyson, lyricist for…
Album | Steve Earle and the Dukes – Guy
Steve Earle knew he had to make Guy, when Guy Clark died of lymphoma at the age of seventy-six in 2016, because he’d already made a record for Townes Van Zandt. “I knew when Guy died that I’d have to…
Album | Beth Gibbons – Henryk Gorecki: Symphony No. 3 (Symphony of Sorrowful Songs)
Portishead has been on an extended sabbatical since the release of Third in 2008. Other than the release of their cover of ABBA’s ‘SOS’ in 2016, the band has been quiet. Left to her own devices, Beth Gibbons responded to…
Album | Luther Dickinson and the Sisters of the Strawberry Moon – Solstice
Under the light of the “Strawberry Moon” in 2016 (named for the time of year when the fruit is harvested), Luther Dickinson brought together a number of mostly female guests and recorded four days worth of music. The resulting collaboration…
Album | Jason Ringenberg – Stand Tall
It’s not often a punk from a hog farm in Southern Illinois gets a chance to escape and raise rock hell with a band like The Scorchers, but Jason Ringenberg believed he could “kick American roots music into the modern…