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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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Author: Michael Berick

Record Review from web archive March 25, 2009

Nick Lowe

Quiet Please is, as it subtitle indicates, not Nick Lowe’s first Best Of (that’s 16 All Time Lowes), his biggest Best Of (The Doings), his most hits-packed Best Of (Basher), or his most rarities-filled Best Of (The Wilderness Years). But this two-disc collection is his most comprehensive Best Of, and, perhaps, his best Best Of. [...]

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Record Review from web archive March 4, 2009

Brigitte DeMeyer

Although Brigitte DeMeyer comes from the Bay Area, her music radiates with the sounds of the south. Red River Flower, the follow-up to her acclaimed 2005 disc Something Ater All, benefits from being recorded in Nashville with such ace sidemen as Buddy Miller, Mike Henderson, Al Perkins, Phil Madeira and Brady Blade (who again serves [...]

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Record Review from web archive October 25, 2008

Two Cow Garage

Fans of classic American bar rock can raise a toast to Two Cow Garage. They serve up a potent blend of ragged-but-right guitar riffs, propulsive drums, nicotine-ravaged vocals, and songs about girls, drinking and rock ‘n’ roll. It is the songs, written by Two Cow Garage’s main men Micah Schnabel and Shane Sweeney, which really [...]

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

Kristin Mooney – Hydroplane

Images of travel course through Hydroplane, but Kristin Mooney doesn’t traffic in greasy trucker tales. Moody instead uses her traveling imagery – where you find “highways like veins” or encounter a “dream color bus” – to convey her characters’ physical and emotional rootlessness. While “Mexican highway’ offers a postcard view of “artichoke fields / Lane [...]

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Not Fade Away - Reissue Review from Issue #75 May-June 2008

Ben Vaughn Combo – Beautiful Thing

Before striking Hollywood gold penning music for TV shows such as “Third Rock From The Sun”, Ben Vaughn was part of the 1980s New York/Hoboken scene, along with fellow retro-minded music-geek rockers the Fleshtones and Marshall Crenshaw. The latter, in fact, covered Vaughn’s sublime “I’m Sorry (But So Is Brenda Lee)”. While that song isn’t [...]

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Not Fade Away - Reissue Review from Issue #73 Jan-Feb 2008

Peter Holsapple & Chris Stamey – Mavericks

When dB’s founders Chris Stamey and Peter Holsapple reunited to record again eight years after Stamey had left the band, fans got excited to hear the cult outfit’s jangly, jagged college rock again. Their 1991-released record, however, delivered something slightly different: acoustic-based, harmony-heavy folk-pop, more Everly Brothers than Big Star. But what initially seemed overly [...]

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Waxed - Record Review from Issue #73 Jan-Feb 2008

Dollar Store – Money Music

Dollar Store is the rare Waco Brothers side project that doesn’t include Jon Langford. Guitarist Dean “Deano” Schlabowkske’s outfit retains some of the Wacos’ rowdy, politically spiked alt-country rock. The band’s sophomore effort, however, strips away some of their debut’s twangier elements to create a fierce cowpunk sound reminiscent of Jason & the Scorchers. It [...]

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Miked - Live Reviews from Issue #72 Nov-Dec 2007

Lucinda Williams – El Rey Theater (Los Angeles, CA)

Lucinda Williams threw herself a big old party the beginning of September in her on-again-off-again-on-again home of Los Angeles. Over the course of six nights, she did five shows, devoting each one to performing a specific studio album in the first set, followed by a mix of songs in the second set. (She repeated the [...]

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Waxed - Record Review from Issue #72 Nov-Dec 2007

Luca – Fractions

Tucson, Arizona, musician Nick Luca showcases several musical personas on Fractions. Power-pop is served up on the infectious opener “Damned”, which he follows splendidly with the bouncy New Wave-ish “One Way Ticket Home”. Luca (who uses his surname as his band name) flashes his grittier side on the Stonesy garage-rocker “Pretty Mama”, but quickly switches [...]

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Waxed - Record Review from Issue #71 Sep-Oct 2007

Jeffrey Halford & The Healers – Broken Chord

Jeffrey Halford may live in the San Francisco area, but his music hails from someplace much further south by southeast. The swampy, foot-stomping rocker “Dead Man’s Hand” kicks off an album that also makes stops in Louisiana, Texas and Memphis. Halford touches on Hurricane Katrina in two politically charged numbers — the acoustic bluesy “Ninth [...]

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From the Blogs

  • Brittany Holljes on the Origins of Delta Rae and Her Healthy Fleetwood Mac Obsession
    Delta Rae might sound like the down-home name of a backwoods country singer but it’s really just Greek to Brittany Holljes. “I think there are a lot of ‘Delta’ bands out there, too, so we kind of get that ... people get confused,” said Holljes, the whip-smart singer of the North Carolina-based sextet (like Deborah Harry used to say about Blondie, Delta Rae i […]
  • Crowd-sourcing to crowd-pleasing: The rise of Kat Edmonson
    If Kat Edmonson ever becomes a household name, she can put it down not just to her talent as a jazz singer, but to some decidedly modern financing as well. The 29-year-old Texan, an old-school chanteuse with a contemporary lilt, has funded production of her second album via a community workshop and through… […]
  • When to get your ass saved and when to drown
    How does the co-writing song process differ from the alone songwriting process you just wrote about? Co-writing is quite different from writing alone. When I'm working on something alone I have complete freedom. Freedom to experiment, to make mistakes, to try things I'm quite sure won't work and the freedom to reconstruct whatever has come bef […]
  • CD Review - Fiddleworms "See The Light"
    The ambitious new album See The Light, from Alabama quintet Fiddleworms is a cavalcade of styles with literally a parade of guest musicians including the University of North Alabama marching Band. The eleven original tracks are interspersed with snippets of radio sound effects and spoken word segments that flow from jazzy blues to stomping country rock fusio […]
  • Interview with Raul Malo from the Mavericks
    May 2013 There are very few singers or bands that have a 100% distinctive Trademark sound; but The Mavericks achieved that very early in their career and in the UK you still can’t go to a Wedding without being corralled onto the dance-floor as soon as you hear the opening bars to Dance The Night Away. After breaking up in 2004 lead singer and songwriter, Rau […]
  • The Great Escape, Brighton, 2013: day one
    So, here we are again, tramping the streets of Brighton, squeezing into someunfeasibly small spaces to see bands we've never heard of... I'd been feeling somewhat underexcited by this year's Great Escape because it the only one of hundreds of names on the bill that I knew I liked was Billy Bragg, who appears at the Dome tonight. But a quick bu […]

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