In her former band the Freight Hoppers, Cary Fridley’s rhythm guitar was the propulsive fuel that kept the group of old-time music youngsters from capsizing under the weight of tradition. That intimate familiarity with the energetic pulse of the music is transferred to her first solo recording, a fine document of her dedication to the [...]

Clem Snide formed in New Jersey in the early ’90s, a full-bore punk band that gradually eased toward an edgy roots/country sound. By its 1998 debut, You Were a Diamond, the band’s transformation from Replacements-tinged howl to Wilco-esque whisper was complete.
With their third album, The Ghost Of Fashion, guitarist/songwriter Eef Barzelay and company mature into [...]

The same tension between tradition and innovation that has long played out in mainstream country music is fiercely fought in the smaller, more doctrinaire world of bluegrass. Having led inarguably the best traditional bluegrass band in the world for most of a decade, Del McCoury is far too wise a man to embrace much change.
And [...]

Fred Eaglesmith must have known that longtime bass player Ralph Schipper’s last show with the band would be one for the ages, so he decided to record it for posterity. The result of that night in California has yielded this 24-song double-disc of Eagle­smith and his band, the Flying Squirrels (Schipper, William P. Bennett on [...]

In concert, dressed in their truck-driver best dirty tees and torn jeans, the members of Frog Holler look like a gaggle of guys who have, true to their name, spent a long weekend gigging toads in the hollows of rural Berks County, Pennsylvania. That’s Pennsylvania Dutch country, where every game is an away game. But [...]

If Lucinda Williams and Tom Waits had a baby girl, and she came out singing, she might sound a little like Gloria Deluxe. Equal parts ballsy blues and pretty country, Hooker isn’t an easy record, but who wants easy?
Some of these songs belong in a French cabaret, a few could pass in a Southern blues [...]

If the democratic franchise in Canada were restricted to citizens 18 to 30, The Tragically Hip’s Gordon Downie could have been Prime Minister, had the job held any allure. Such is the esteem that has been showered upon the group since their rise to the relatively lofty status of Huge In Canada.
The release of Coke [...]

On their second full-length album, Japan­cakes have taken their psychedelic twang beyond pastiche and into the realm of fascination. This young instrogroup from Athens, Georgia, creates some stupefyingly beautiful drones, which pulse around one chord for up to ten minutes.
Reminiscent of the Dirty Three at their most elegiac, or Tortoise at their most melodic, this [...]

There was a time when Lloyd Cole, along with his Commotions, inspired anticipation with each new release, and rightly so. Cole’s cool smooth vocals, supple guitar and smoldering pop songs made him the pouting post-new-wave poster boy for brainy rock ’n’ roll.
Cole broke up the Commotions after just three albums, an indication of the creative [...]

This Austin band’s follow up to its 1999 debut Swang (a little swing, a little twang) finds the six-piece outfit mining the motherlode of the Texas honky-tonk tradition.
Stringer and his cohorts mix Wynn Stewart-like weepers such as “What Do I Know” and “Don’t Tell Me Goodbye”) with dance-floor-crowding twin Fender rockers such as the call-and-response [...]