The blues has been incorporated into many other styles, creating blues rock, country blues and more, but Canadian Harry Manx (who lived for 25 years in India, Japan and Europe) has come up with a new hybrid that could be dubbed blues raga: acoustic blues played with the intricate sound, phrasing and rhythm of traditional [...]

With a sound that resembles Dwight Yoakam if he grew up in New York City, the Dark Horses waste little time creating a homey, wholesome sound on this disc’s title track. Lead singer and songwriter Sam Park, along with drummer J. Hughes and bassist Philip Cohen, mine a vein that falls somewhere between Wilco and [...]

Working with some familiar names from non-mainstream Nashville (the players include bassist Dave Jacques and drummer Rick Schell, and Greg Trooper and Gwil Owen are among the cowriters), journeyman guitarist/vocalist/songwriter Richard Ferreira has created an album full of memorable songs — some of them blessed by horns, all of them soulfully delivered. Ferreira may have [...]

The first thing you hear when you put on the Baptism River Ramblers’ disc is the lazy sound of the fiddle soon joined by the soothing boom of Mike “Razz” Russell’s smooth bass on Huddie Ledbetter’s “Bring Me A Little Water Sylvie”. The song only gets better once Maria Asp’s gorgeous, calming, gospel-tinged vocal finds [...]

The same America that gave us the Beach Boys also gave us Charles Manson, and for every Woodstock there’s an Altamont. Amid the gatefold-sleeved nostalgia for summer breaks, first loves or your first joint is the half-memory of that house on the block where something bad happened or the woods where a body was once [...]

David Grier has a fine bluegrass pedigree; during the 1960s and ’70s, his father, Lamar, played banjo for both Bill Monroe and Hazel Dickens. However, as a member of bands such as Psychograss and Phillips, Grier, & Flinner, his own recent work has often tended toward the avant-garde. This record is neither traditional bluegrass nor [...]

Alex McManus knows how to play second fiddle…and guitar, and banjo, and just about anything else he might be called on to play. As part of the sprawling country orchestra that is Lambchop — not to mention his participation in electro/organic alchemists Empire State and stints backing Vic Chesnutt and Simon Joyner — McManus has [...]

Regarded as something of a mythical figure – in the company of, say, Scott Walker, Arthur Lee and Brian Wilson – by many of today’s young songwriters (especially in Britain), Lee Hazlewood has found himself undergoing somewhat of a career renaissance recently. The sixteen tracks on this tribute album are proof of the reverence and [...]

On her second solo album in as many years, tireless former Tsunami frontwoman/D.I.Y. pioneer Jenny Toomey tackles the catalog of Franklin Bruno, former leader of indie-pop band Nothing Painted Blue. A current solo artist and sometime journalist, Bruno writes witty and expansive songs that place him somewhere between Noel Coward and Gordon Gano. He fits [...]

This exquisite salute was released on the 90th anniversary of the seminal folk singer’s birth at the annual Woody Guthrie Folk Festival in his hometown of Okemah, Oklahoma. Joel Rafael has worked the folk circuit for nearly three decades in various groups, as a solo performer and in a duo with Rosie Flores. The current [...]