The album name is instructive: This Brooklyn twang-pop quartet aims to distance itself from a New York milieu currently being overrun by style-conscious rockisback! mooks and mickey-mouse post-punkateers. Much is also made in the group’s press releases about the drummer’s brief association with Whiskeytown and the fact that the band has toured with Rhett Miller, [...]

With Reckless Burning, their 2002 debut, Jesse Sykes & the Sweet Hereafter elicited gushing comparisons to such slo-core practitioners as the Cowboy Junkies, Mazzy Star and Low. Those are all apt reference points, to be sure, but Sykes’ sound — languid, ethereal, and spiced with echoey forebodings just this side of spaghetti-western twang — is [...]

The world needs another road song like Paris Hilton needs more press. But then along comes David Mead, with an exception to make the rule. On the title track of his third full-length, Mead does an exquisite job of mining poetry from the monotony of touring alone by car, his connection to a sweetheart breaking [...]

After the expansive 2003 album Feast Of Wire and an impressive presence on Neko Case’s Blacklisted the year before that, Calexico apparently decided this was no time to rest. It’s a good thing, too; although the Convict Pool EP features just six songs and clocks in at just over 20 minutes, it roils with enough [...]

The Subdudes have been pretty subdued for years — their last album came out in 1997 — but they come back strong on this live-in-the-studio recording. While the band now includes two newcomers plus three of the four original members, they pick up right where they left off stylistically. Soulful harmony vocals remain front and [...]

Chris Whitley has been one of the most expansive voices to fall under the loose rubric of blues in eons. That doesn’t mean he plays faster or wails more rapturously or dazzles within the context of those ubiquitous 1-4-5 changes. It means he’s internalized the core sensibility of the idiom, before its ascent into the [...]

Assembled from a hospital bed, Gordon Lightfoot’s twentieth album almost never happened. Lightfoot was performing in his hometown of Orillia, Ontario, in the fall of 2002 when he collapsed onstage from a burst artery. He was airlifted to southern Ontario for emergency surgery but had already slipped into a coma, and it was touch-and-go for [...]

Since his 1986 debut Native Soil, Austin singer-songwriter Darden Smith has bobbed up-and-down and in-and-out with the tides of country fashion. Although a consistently earnest, penetrating tunesmith, he has released seven discs on six labels. Along the way, he’s been positioned as a vintage Texas troubadour, an easy-rolling midstream country act, an alt-country collaborator (with [...]

Perpetually undiscovered Canadian singer-songwriter Ron Sexsmith had dabbled in everything from country to reggae to chamber pop before settling on Beth Orton-like folk-electronica for 2002′s fine Cobblestone Runway. Though his latest, Retriever, ditches the emphasis on beats for a more uptempo ’70s pop feel, the core aesthetic, centered around acoustic guitars, Beatlesque melodies and slight, [...]