Late in life, Gatemouth Brown has returned to the brass and elegance with which he began recording in the late 1940s. His latest reprises much he learned in the interim, stirring the stew of Texas music that forever spices his playing, turning his still considerable skills toward a set of mostly jazz standards. No longer [...]

From deep within the underbelly of Seattle’s lesser-known musical subcultures comes an unexpected homage to Johnny Cash. The brainchild of label head/Kill Switch…Klick leader dA Sebastian, Americana reinterprets Cash’s music in a variety of settings. Sometimes it’s a good notion. Dead Leaves Rising’s opening goth reworking of “Ballad Of A Teenage Queen” begs the question [...]

Doug Stevens has a different take on the whole notion of alternative country music. Born and raised in Mississippi, he moved to New York to pursue a career in opera. Four years ago he tested positive for the HIV virus, then his boyfriend left, and apparently writing country songs got him through. The Outband is [...]

So, like, los bros Ween come out of the frat basement late one morning with this, like, totally cool idea that they’d seen a bunch of Hee-Haw night before and, dude, wouldn’t it be rad to make a country record before they went back to making another one of their really clever critically approved indie [...]

“I got a big house / I got a big wife / I got big dreams / been chasin’ ‘em all of my life,” Gary Heffern sings on “Big Thoughts”, the penultimate track of his third long-player. That’s a pretty good, even courageous (if unmistakably fictitious) summation of a life that’s taken Heffern from raucous [...]

Late to this party, having missed the preceding three long-players, I have only overheard conversations for background. The tenor of which seems to be that Freakwater are somehow less authentic an expression of country phrasing because Janet Beveridge Bean drums and sings with alt-rockers Eleventh Dream Day, and that their songwriting (by partner Catherine Irwin) [...]

Ever since 1988′s schizophrenic Whisper Tames the Lion (their second, actually), DNC have been worth watching, if only to see how they might resolve the conflict between loud, impassioned hard rock and soft, subtle country-style songs. For a time it seemed Kevn Kinney had quieted this dissonance with a low-profile solo career that has produced [...]