Eric Bachmann, who led North Carolina indie-rockers Archers Of Loaf throughout the ’90s, took a turn from insouciant noise-pop to melancholy when he initiated Crooked Fingers in 2000. Red Devil Dawn, the third Crooked Fingers album, continues that mode — but this time around there’s also a surprising levity at work, with the tunes coming [...]

Redneck surrealism. That’s the term filmmaker David Gordon Green coined to describe his style — including the bittersweet, dreamlike love story All The Real Girls — but it seems an apt description for the woozy, rootsy music made by such bands as Fruit Bats, Iron & Wine, Califone and Centro-Matic. And it fits the Gainesville, [...]

The historical record would argue that almost nothing I have to say about Will Oldham, and his various incarnations, should be believed. Years ago I reviewed an early Palace release for Spin, and while I can’t remember which record it was, I know the review was a glowing bit of work-for-hire. Little enough had come [...]

Philip Larkin wrote that in all people there sleeps a sense of how their lives might have been different, had they been loved. “Nothing changes that,” he concluded. Amy Rigby’s fourth album alternates between awakening that sense and trying to bury it. Like her previous work, Til The Wheels Fall Off frames Rigby’s scuffles with [...]

Damn that Pete Yorn. He’s a budding rock star whose female fans want him and whose male fans want to be him. He’s nearly a pinup, ripe for videos, the glossy magazines and cameos on WB television shows. It’s enough to hate the dude. Yorn’s nearly got it all. That which made his 2001 Columbia [...]

Sure, the garage thing has been done before — lots of times, and well, too. But that’s no reason to begrudge the new breed their chance to crank out a little carburetor dung — especially the White Stripes, the most dirty-toned and inspired of the new blooze crews. Elephant, the duo’s fourth album, is as [...]

“O Death” might not be on your Top 40 station, but has there ever been so much good bluegrass within easy earshot? With Alison Krauss accumulating Grammys and country crossover stars from Patty Loveless to Dolly Parton to the Dixie Chicks playing up their mountain roots, there hasn’t been so much bluegrass in the air [...]

Gruff guy that he is, John Hiatt has a way of getting right to the point. So he starts out his eighteenth album by declaring, “Well I do my best thinkin’ sittin’ on my ass.” It’s an interesting contradiction — a thoughtful and very literate songwriter who makes some of his best music on the [...]

Even as a man who, in the past two decades, has produced arguably more landmark records than anyone since Phil Spector, Daniel Lanois is still clearly questioning himself as an artist in his own right. Of course, the sonic attributes on this third collection of his own songs are the expected blurry atmospheres that have [...]