The King Wilkie of 2009 is not the same King Wilkie that heartened fans of traditional bluegrass with their youthful prowess five years ago. Nor is it the same King Wilkie that offered weighty, polished acoustic fare even a couple years back. No, this is, quite literally, a different band. Gone is most of the [...]

The fact that this is a review of new albums by both Seth Walker and Clarence Bucaro isn’t meant to suggest that they’re collaborators, ex-bandmates, part of the same regional music scene, or anything of the sort. They’re not. But neither is comparing them unjustified. They’re pretty close in age (either just shy of 30, [...]

If ever there was a time when a song about a man giving up on life because he can’t support his family made a disturbing sort of sense, that time is now. Whether it’s due to timeliness or just a naturally melancholic disposition, that’s how Jason Isbell chooses to begin his second solo album – [...]

“City of Refuge” is a name claimed by plenty of charismatic churches who want to market themselves as oases of comfort. That clearly wasn’t what Castanets brainchild Raymond Raposa had in mind when he selected the title for his fourth album. Som critics have likened the album to an arthouse film soundtrack. And there’s a [...]

The considerable mystique surrounding David Eugene Edwards’ music – with 16 Horsepower or with Wovenhand, which appears to be his primary gig at the moment – isn’t entirely of his own making. Most of us don’t really know how to take a contemporary folk-rock singer and songwriter with undeniable originality, a penchant for dark, churning [...]

It takes a mixture of generosity and suspension of disbelief to want to hear what Jamey Johnson has done since “Honky Tonk Badonkadonk” (he was one of the three writers who gave Trace Adkins that particular joke-gone-obnoxious). But anyone who can muster those qualities will be rewarded, because Johnson’s 2008 CD, That Lonesome Song, is [...]

In case you’ve missed the current pop-culture fascination with vampires (the dead) coexisting among us (the living) – see the teenage forbidden love movie Twilight or the HBO series True Blood – Jolie Holland’s fourth album, The Living And The Dead, offers a much more nuanced journey into existential borderlands. For starters, death, in these [...]

Grayson Capps is not just a seriously good songwriter – if one who has relied quite heavily at times on the exaggerated color of deep-south character sketches – he’s also an entertainer of the rarest sort: a master of variety, humor and engaging storytelling who manages to seem warm and familiar and larger-than-life at the [...]

Susan Tedeschi didn’t start writing songs just this year. All her albums, save the 2005 covers set Hope And Desire, feature originals, some of them co-written. But Back To The River marks the first time she has ventured into the more exacting territory of social commentary, and she had a hand in writing every song [...]

What’s a willfully against-the-grain stylist like Holly Golightly to do when Amy Winehouse and Duffy take one of her sources of inspiration – ’60s girl groups – to the mainstream? The answer given on Dirt Don’t Hurt (as well as on her 2007 disc You Can’t Buy A Gun When You’re Crying) is to leave [...]