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No Depression has been the foremost journalistic authority on roots music for well over a decade, publishing 75 issues from 1995 to 2008. No Depression ceased publishing magazines in 2008 and took to the web. We have made the contents of those issues accessible online via this extensive archive and also feature a robust community website with blogs, photos, videos, music, news, discussion and more.

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Waxed - Record Review from Issue #75 May-June 2008

Amelia

A Long, Lovely List Of Repairs (Adrenaline)

By

The third album by this Portland, Oregon, band is awash in the glorious shimmer of melancholy. Just as beauty and sadness come together in that resonant emotional state, so too these fourteen songs combine contrasting sonic possibilities. Singer Teisha Helgerson has a voice that is at once fragile and robust, with a crystalline clarity not unlike Aimee Mann’s. The writing is rich with melodies that could reduce strong men to tears, even if sung in a foreign tongue. Essentially an acoustic trio of guitar (Scott Weddle), bass (James Emerson), and drums (Helgerson), Amelia brings an arsenal of additional instruments to the table, as well as a host of supporting players, fleshing out the sound with judiciously deployed strings, clarinet, and all manner of keyboards. While the entire setting has a cabaret-like setting and volume, the band embraces everything from European cafe songs to gently experimental contraption-bolstered hijinks.

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Originally Featured in Issue #75 May-June 2008

Cover of Issue #75 May-June 2008

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More articles from this issue:

  • Billy Bragg

    Billy Bragg - Waiting for the small steps forward • The year must have been 1991, the Gulf War was on, and Billy Bragg was giving a concert at Washington University in St. Louis. I was studying English literature but spent most of …

  • Pinetop Perkins

    Pinetop Perkins - The living blues • It is difficult to imagine any man three months shy of his 95th birthday looking more regally insouciant than Pinetop Perkins does from his backstage perch at an out-of-the-way ro…

  • Robert Forster

    Robert Forster - The sun's gonna shine in my back door someday • It could be the sun coming through blinds as you play a record (so it's sun on the music). It could be the sun coming through as you practice in the loungeroom of a large Brisbane…

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