Kevin Kirby used to play guitar in the Little Rock, Arkansas, band Ho-Hum. A few years back, they signed to a major label (Universal), put out a debut record, drove around the country, came home, got out of their contract, and released a second record on their own. Kirby is also a painter and the [...]

The digest version of this review might read: Guitars speak louder than words. But the stories that Chris Grabau’s chord swipes, ricocheting overdrive, and jackhammer rhythms tell: youthful dreams dying, the constant yearning — “Don’t know!” Grabau screams at a question we never quite hear — the feeling of being entrapped by nothing clear, not [...]

Late afternoon, just starting to rain, and you have to make a conscious decision whether to turn on the light and continue working, or turn on the stereo and let darkness settle over the room. You Were A Diamond, the debut album of New York band Clem Snide, is a perfect accompaniment to procrastination.
Songwriter Eef [...]

The fourth album from Chico, California, group Mother Hips finds the band back on its own self-titled imprint, after being dropped by American Recordings on the heels of its excellent but largely unheard Shootout.
“There’s some boys I know who play that rock ‘n’ roll/They’ve slept on a lot of floors to get that California soul,” [...]

Lathered in a sunscreeny slather (SPF 25 or 6 to 4), Claire O. is all deck-chaired out in a pair not a peach of Wide-Load Jackie O’s, flippety-flappety trip-hop flip-flops, and a curvalicious little two-piece tootsie dipper cut for strut and high-five-fashioned from a frothy fabric in the snakiest shade of green this side of [...]

The sophomore effort of this graceful Nashville combo more than delivers on the promise of their eponymous debut, with Tucker Martine’s dynamic, inventive production adding a welcome spark to principal songwriter Mack Linebaugh’s bleakly eloquent ruminations.
The core group of Linebaugh, multi-instrumentalist Richard McLaurin, bassist Brian Ray and drummer Sean Keith (the last two since departed) [...]

Mike West’s fourth album offers a relatively unusual mixture of bluegrass, New Orleans jazz and blues, Celtic jigs and string-band romps using seven musicians and fifteen instruments. He pulls off all that variety with a reasonable sense of cohesiveness, but the end result is less than compelling.
West, a native Australian raised in England, received some [...]

On her first album, 1996’s Living With Ghosts, singer-songwriter Patty Griffin trod the trad-folk route, stripping her songs to the bone with only voice and acoustic guitar. It proved as satisfying a strategy as it was gutsy, setting in bold relief Griffin’s intimate vignettes of love and loss, and, more importantly, her striking vocals — [...]

“In this vain world of troubles, many accidents occur/I’m going to sing about one as sad as you’ve ever heard.” So begins “Granite Mills”, a story of a fire in Fall Rivers, where a town might have been saved “had the truth been told from the flames of the burning mill.” The song has an [...]

In their ten years together, Steve Riley & the Mamou Playboys have steadily become more prominent on the Louisiana scene, fueled by a combination of youthful energy, glorious chops and a enthusiastic reverence for the Cajun tradition. They’ve recorded six albums, each steeped in the heritage of Iry LeJuene, the Balfa Brothers and the Hackberry [...]