On his second album, Fort Worth singer-songwriter Collin Herring is again joined by his dad, Ben Roi Herring, whose nifty steel guitar work fits nicely against Austin Barker’s forceful lead guitar on the one-two punch of “Aphorism” and “Back Of Your Mind”, the Son Volt-like opener. Herring, who says his father exposed him to the [...]

Peter Himmelman’s latest is full of electric guitars, chomping away at the air like a dog trying to grab a stream of water from a hose. Add to that the snap and wallop of drummer Pete Thomas (Elvis Cos-tello’s longtime backbeat maestro) and you’ve got the foundation of a world class combo.
The eleven songs here [...]

Wisely, the Bills (formerly the Bill Hilly Band) open their third album with an overture because the quintet’s essence is diversity and, at fifteen tracks, their new album sprawls gloriously, and not a little eccentrically, all over the musical map.
The overture forewarns of what’s coming, with snippets of North American folk, ragtime and even gypsy [...]

Last Train Home combines various American music forms — country, blues, jazz, etc. — with band enough members to field a softball team. The songs on Bound Away, written mostly by leader Eric Brace, largely evoke a back-roads feeling of melancholy and searching.
“Dogs On The East Side”, highlighted by Kevin Cordt’s gloomy trumpet, visits the [...]

As a multi-instrumentalist prodigy, Ryan Holladay has followed closely in the footsteps of Ricky Skaggs, his mentor and producer. Holladay first came to national attention when he became the youngest artist ever to perform on the Grand Ole Opry at the age of five; now in his early teens, he is releasing his first album [...]

This six-song mini-album, cut live-to-analog with ex-Whiskeytowner Mike Daly, serves as a rough-and-tumble counterpart to Kellogg & the Sixers’ major-label debut, which came out in February.
Kellogg consistently draws comparisons to Ryan Adams and Tom Petty. Fair enough; his folk-twang-pop sound and confessional storytelling does feel familiar at first listen. Think of that familiarity as a [...]