If there is such a thing as an alt.country/Americana/whatever buzz band, this year it was Shovels & Rope. Heading to Pickathon this year, I was mostly excited to reunite with my Portland folks and drink during the afternoon for a few days. But Shovels & Rope was high on my short list of bands [...]
Hurray for the Riff Raff is the New Orleans group led by Puerto Rican, Bronx-raised Alynda lee Sygara, whose narrative reads like a folk song. After running away from home at age 17, she hopped freight trains and played crossing the country with The Deadman Street Orchestra. After two self-released albums, the UK label [...]
Courtesy Tier is a two-piece, New-York based guitar and drums duo that caught my ear during an inbox sweep recently, and I haven’t been able to stop listening since. They’ve been providing a dreamy rock soundtrack to a lot of fall walks and drives around Northern California these last two months. Omer and Layton are [...]
The Horrible Crowes are the side project of The Gaslight Anthem’s lead singer Brian Fallon. It’s pretty easy to note that as a side project, the new band isn’t standing too far apart from the ground laid by The Gaslight Anthem in the last handful of years. The Horrible Crowes first album, Elsie, is more [...]
A bunch of months ago, at my messy desk at my old job, I had a teeny post-it note getting knocked around that said “Will Phalen.” This typically meant that I wanted to follow up on a musician, which I was generally too distracted to do. Another handful of months later, I got an email [...]
Sharon Van Etten’s name had been floating on the periphery of my awareness for a while, when I finally wised up and downloaded her latest EP from emusic (using my friend AMA’s account. Thanks! Hope Mexico is fun!). It’s quickly become part of my heavy rotation. I missed her Portland show last Friday with Junip, [...]
I’d been tracking The Roadside Graves for a while now, and even ranked their last full-length, LP, My Son’s Home, in my Top 20 of 2009. They’ve been on a roll since then, releasing the fantastic EP, You Won’t Be Happy With Me, earlier this year. So they’d been on my must-see list for Pickathon [...]
Here’s a sentence I never thought I’d write: There’s a lot of great stuff coming out of the Midwest. I think we all know about Bon Iver, or Justin Vernon, who, in 2008, made it cool to spend an entire season in a remote Wisconsin cabin. Then there’s the promising Juniper Tar, and now Missouri-native [...]
Mumford and Sons is a four-piece band from London and one of my favorite discoveries of the last month or two. Their full-length Sigh No More will would definitely be comfortably near the top of my 2010 albums list –if it hadn’t been released in 2009. Not surprisingly, they seem to have been getting a [...]
Ellensburg, WA, is a small town in Central Washington which you will likely never have the occasion to drive through, unless you attend the Sasquatch Festival in George, Washington (really), which is something you should probably not do. Ellensburg is also home to Star Anna and the Laughing Dogs, an Americana-infused rock band whose full-length [...]