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 [...]

With twenty years gone by since his debut album, Tom Laverack has honed his writing and performing into a perfectly matched set. His voice and songs meet one another on varied turf and go gallivanting about the hillsides. World weariness runs through the entire set in a way that a man two decades younger couldn’t [...]

At the time of her debut Cat, released a couple years ago when she turned 50, Catherine Russell was already an accomplished singer with an extensive array of credits. Having grown up with musician parents (her pianist father, Luis Russell, served as Louis Armstrong’s music director, and her mother, Carline Ray, a vocalist and bassist, [...]

This set of ten songs in a duo setting has all the exuberant sense of discovery associated with jazz pairings, and none of the rote mannerisms often found in folk-volume guitar-based music. Nina Nastasia’s voice and guitar playing have a liquidity that allows her melodic sensibility to swoop around and through the strumming and picking. [...]

On their second album, Wussy continue to craft songs that mix deftly casual propulsion with the ache of life’s fleeting inevitabilities. Erstwhile Ass Ponys frontman Chuck Cleaver sings about a third of the songs, with Lisa Walker handling the rest, and it’s a rich balance. Both favor small narratives that take deeply rooted feelings — [...]

Solo cello over the past few decades has brought forth works ranging from David Holland’s angular jazz improvisations to David Darling’s near-New Age atmospherics. The unadulterated acoustic warmth of cello, bowed or plucked, is in the same range as the human voice, giving further intimacy to the solitary instrument. Erik Friedlander’s latest is a mixture [...]

Continuing with the fearlessness of 2005’s Jailhouse Religion, David Childers again hitches his smartly barbed words to the dusty ferociousness of a confidently muscular band. Childers’ tales tend to present a first impression of bleak circumstances. The opener, “Mama”, sports the line, “I knew she’d kill me one day,” while “What Will Become Of The [...]

Stephen Kellogg and his cohorts are in a tradition of polished, street-level rockers who shape the poetics of everyday life as lived by “regular folks” into anthemic dimensions. Depending on your reference points, that can be a good thing, or a neutral thing. Australian Paul Kelly finds greater mystery in the world around him; Graham [...]