In his enthusiastic No Depression review of Jon Hardy and the Public’s first album, Make Me Like Gold, Ed Ward recognized the “weirdness” of the band’s take on Americana and their original reworking of inevitable sources like The Band, Dylan and Young. Indie-rock listeners will surely hear another echo, that of Spoon’s Britt Daniel, a [...]

The North Mississippi Allstars’ popularity with jam-band audiences is easily explained and just as easily overstated. If they can stretch a solo till the second coming of Duane Allman, they also rarely noodle or lose the shape of the blues. The heavy riffage and grueling rhythms of “Shake”, the opening track on their fifth studio [...]

It might seem premature to call this Nashville singer’s first full-length a breakthrough, but that’s very much the way it sounds. Along with Cat Power and Beth Orton, Niceley moves around plush sheets of sound with troubled emotions and sensual insights. She draws on the blues for personal strength, and on string sections — meticulously [...]

A poet wrote, “Now that you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner, you’ve destroyed it everywhere in the world.” Ana Egge begs to differ. This 30-minute set of ten covers (the inevitable quip being she felt too torpid for writing) reveals the inspiring indulgences of wasting precious time, of doing nothing for the [...]