Nine (Musical) Things That Will Almost Certainly Not Disappoint You In 2009: Besides the whole Obama-is-President thing, it turns out there’s a lot to look forward to this year, like a host of new releases. What follows is a very subjective list of potential highlights, but please bear in mind: Many of release dates are [...]

As we close out 2008, here’s a guide to some of the best artists you might have missed this year. (Warning! May contain a higher-than-usual number of sensitive singer-songwriters. Just so you know.) BEN SOLLEE: A Louisville-based singer-songwriter-cellist and member of Abigail Washburn’s Sparrow Quartet, Sollee frequently gets compared to Ray LaMontagne, if LaMontagne were [...]

The woeful economy, declining record sales and lessening of shelf space have all contributed to the decline of the box set, those expensive, overpadded exercises in nostalgia and redundancy that were once the ultimate in musical gift-giving. This year’s crop of box sets, anthologies, reissues and nostalgia set pieces offers up some keepers, as well [...]

Steve Wynn Returns: Former Dream Syndicate frontman/paisley underground enabler Steve Wynn has been on a roll lately, releasing a disc with the Baseball Project (his collaboration with Young Fresh Fellow Scott McCaughey and R.E.M.’s Peter Buck, among others) and joining with the Teenaged Prayers in a band called Hazel Motes (named, it’s a safe bet, [...]

Vic Chesnutt And Elf Power, Together At Last: Singer-songwriter Vic Chesnutt and fellow Athens, Georgia, musicians Elf Power – known for darkly weird folk and darkly weird pop, respectively – have teamed with backing band the Amorphous Strums for the darkly weird folk-pop disc Dark Developments. Recorded in Chesnutt’s attic, the disc is already prompting [...]

Cowpunk, Revisited: Anyone who thinks alt-country has suffered from an excess of delicacy and earnestness in the post-O Brother years can take heart: Two new upstarts are currently serving up authentic-ish approximations of classic cowpunk. The New York five-piece O’Death (named for the folk standard popularized most recently by Ralph Stanley, which is a good [...]

Johnny Cash Remixed Not As Terrible As You Might Expect: Johnny Cash Remixed, on which various iconic Cash songs are reworked by a host of unlikely, predominantly British artists, isn’t as bad as it could have been, which is saying a lot. Remixed was executive-produced by John Carter Cash, whose attitude toward the licensing and [...]