Sometimes the recordings of a great songwriter are clumsy or otherwise imperfect. But sometimes that makes them all the more touching and beautiful. Chris Richards’ performance of these ten magnificent songs is not polished, but that is not to say it is not in its own way perfect.
The style is melancholy, trad country in stripped-down [...]

Nashville based singer-songwriter Michael Kelsh , a founding member of Southern Culture On The Skids, makes gentle folk songs that need to be here now on Well Of Mercy, his third solo release.
Kelsh’s songs function as dreamy folkified hymnody in the parlance of common language, uncommonly good guitar work, roughly whispery vocals, and the sweetness [...]

On her first self-released album, former Capitol and Warner Western “real cowgirl” Joni Harms stretches a bit beyond the western themes and sounds that are her main forte. The move pays off on “Millie”, a supremely well-crafted paean to an older and wiser waitress who “took me under her wing”; co-written by Wood Newton (of [...]

A talented North Carolina songwriter and a twang-pop vet from the ’80s (with Right Profile) and early ’90s (Carneys), Jeffrey Dean Foster made a splash in 1998 with the Pinetops and their disc Above Ground And Vertical. This acoustic live EP is a solo stopgap between studio records; as such, the lo-fi, clinking-beer-bottle ambiance conveys [...]

The aesthetic of amateurism isn’t the unique provenance of alternative country, but it’s certainly found a home there. With the exception of punk, few musical movements have been so willing, from the get-go, to embrace creaky, quirky, and happenstance sounds beyond all chops and experience, and make a commercial run for it.
Though he’s been playing [...]

Listening to Hope Sandoval is like diving into a vast pool whose icy surface gives way to a bath-temperature mixture of blood and honey. The jarring liquid texture seems perfectly natural because, like Beth Orton or Everything But The Girl’s Tracey Thorn, Sandoval makes the most sense at 3 a.m., when thoughts tender and macabre [...]

Similar in tone and texture to Washington state’s late, lamented Picketts, the Honky Tonk Chateau shuffles and flaunts a plethora of styles with convincing, infectious passion. Three of the four write, while the fourth, drummer Chris Appleby, is an atomic clock.
Elastic vocalist Sheri Hurst grabs the spotlight with her folk-rocking “If It Were So” and [...]

As a kid, I was something of a 45-rpm junkie. Sure, I spent hours listening to, dissecting, and cutting my critical baby teeth on classic albums — seamless works of art from Pet Sounds to Abbey Road to Dark Side Of The Moon — but 45s were another world altogether. Creating a great album has [...]

Bloomington, Indiana, five-piece the Mysteries Of Life are major-label refugees featuring members of Antenna, the Blake Babies and the Vulgar Boatmen. Distant Relative, their first album for their own label, is, quite adamantly, a pop record. Airy and earnest, it’s a jangly and largely acoustic offering reminiscent of the best Marshall Crenshaw records of the [...]

Claire will-not-William tell-not-Tell you right-not-left up-not-down front-not-back that Pat Green poses like a stranded Rodin man a pondery quandary. Furious purists prone to exalt the gestalt of alt find fault by default; Pat-hats rooty-toot-shoot back, frat-a-tat-tat.
The fruition of Claire’s suspicion is that irk of the first ilk is due like a library book in part [...]