Chris Eckman – Harney County - January 2014 January 18th, 2014

Chris Eckman formed Walkabouts in Seattle thirty years ago, a pioneer of the Alternative Country movement. Walkabouts’ low-profile melancholia mirrors their sometime collaborators, Nottingham’s Tindersticks, but Eckman’s solo debut offers an even starker sound, inspired by empty Oregon landscapes, and recorded clean and cold in a vast orchestra studio in Prague. The eleven minute Rock…

Shonna Tucker & Eye Candy – A Tell All - January 2014 January 11th, 2014

Tucker spent eight years playing bass for Drive-By Truckers, the Athens Georgia country rock academy that also gifted a solo career to her ex Jason Isbell. After a detour fronting her strange Sweet Soul Cookin’ With Shonna Tucker Youtube series, Tucker’s half hour calling card seasons the Truckers’ hardboiled slick and greasy gumbo with hummable…

John Lee Hooker – Kabuki Wuki / Born In Mississippi, Raised In Tennessee - January 2014 January 5th, 2014

Two lost Hooker albums, from the unloved early ’70s, re-emerge. Kabuki Wuki captures the 54 year old blues progenitor selling San Francisco longhairs a live electrified Chicago sound, no less than three re-titled retreads of his Boogie Chillen signature vamp giving intuitive accompanists generous stretching time. Born In Mississippi is a studio set, marred by…

Black Sun Ensemble – Behind Purple Clouds - January 2014 January 5th, 2014

The teenage Jesus Acedo gorged on Zeppelin and Shankar at Tucson library, and picked up a guitar to form Black Sun Ensemble in the early ’80s, playing a mystical, mainly instrumental, acid folk blues, that instantly snapped synapses worldwide. But Jesus’s struggle with schizophrenia saw his compositions lose focus. Behind Purple Clouds, completed by the…

King Champion Sounds – Different Drummer - December 2013 December 22nd, 2013

What if The Fall had garnished their rockabilly grooves with swing era horns? What if Can played Ghanaian highlife? What if Morricone had scored Spaghetti westerns in a Moroccan souq? King Champion Sounds, a Dutch veterans’ organization fronted by GW Sok of jazz punks The Ex, recombine canonical influences in new contexts. Orbit Macht Frei…

The Velvet Underground – White Light/White Heat 45th Anniversary Super Deluxe Edition - December 2013 December 22nd, 2013

The Velvet Underground’s second album sank on release in 1968, but became the proto-punk document. In hindsight, it’s a definitive New York minimalist moment too, more indebted to the departing John Cale’s viola and organ drones than to Lou Reed’s free jazz/doo-wop fusions. Without the example of Sister Ray’s sleazy, seventeen minute, two chord splurge,…