Though he’s contributed greatly to several standout albums in recent years, including one considered by many as the best of 2002 (Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot), it’s still hard to think of Jay Bennett and not have that moment flash before you. You know the one, in the Wilco film documentary, I Am Trying To Break [...]

When Mark Olson exiled himself from the Jayhawks a decade ago, curious ears were eager to hear what he would come up with off the beaten path in Joshua Tree, California, with his wife, Victoria Williams. The self-titled, self-released 1997 debut, billed as the Original Harmony Ridge Creek Dippers, answered the question with laid-back, home-fi [...]

Ah, yes…Fastball…you remember their sadly typical rise-and-fall story, right? Out-of-nowhere pop-rock hitmakers with the wondrous “The Way”, from the 1998 album, All The Pain Money Can Buy. The epitome of lightning caught. Then the follow-up two years later, The Harsh Light Of Day, that was the proverbial sound of a tree falling in the forest [...]

Rock albums — even some of the better ones — often come across as a semi-arbitrary collection of songs, so big props to the Honeydogs’ Adam Levy for being ambitious with his art. Already the owner of a very worthy canon of literate Jayhawks-meets-Beatles pop songs, Levy takes his style and vision to the next [...]

Long overdue is Breakin’ Down, Gerald Collier’s first solo effort since his 1999 EP Low Tar Taste and his first full-length since his self-titled major-label rise-and-fall a year earlier. But Collier hardly misses a beat. Stark and muscular, Breakin’ Down mines the same downtrodden country-rock as its immediate predecessor, if with better execution and the [...]

Matthew Ryan remains one restless soul. His fourth widely-distributed album (Ryan also has two limited-edition, website-only releases) finds the singer-songwriter overwhelmed by characters out of step with their lovers, themselves, and/or the world around them. It’s nothing new. The Nashville artist established such an MO at the onset, when he wrapped his 40-grit voice around [...]