Carolyn Mark – The Queen Of Vancouver Island - September 2012 September 16th, 2012

Carolyn Mark writes fifties-flavoured indie-country pop songs, with an unexpectedly bittersweet edge. Our touring hustler heroine is professionally removed from straight society, and spooked by encroaching middle age, failed romances, and the inevitability of compromise. Baby Goats sounds upbeat, but the kids at the petting zoo aren’t hers, everyone seems so young, and she’s alone.…

feedtime – The Aberrant Years - September 2012 September 16th, 2012

Box Sets were once the preserve of canonical Mojo magazine cover stars. Now everyone’s liquidizing their assets before all recorded music becomes worthless. Here’s four CDs of Australia’s finest Eighties pre-grunge unknowns, feedtime. With two founder members that liked Seventies cock rock and pre-war blues respectively, feedtime flayed Duracel bunny roots rhythms with hardcore noise,…

The Bohman Brothers – Back On The Streets - September 2012 September 9th, 2012

Thai dishes are intoned in breathless conjunction with rural Irish place names; lists of pancakes clash with pulpy lit clichés over low end striations; daytime television injury claim adverts are recited with inappropriate sincerity. Sound art veterans The Bohman Brothers invest random words with unearned meanings via the eloquent juxtapositions of their elegantly neutral voices.…

Dan Stuart – The Deliverance Of Marlowe Billings - September 2012 September 2nd, 2012

Hemingway maintained there were no second acts in American lives. The career of the Eighties alternative country pioneer Dan Stuart, a benignly pie-eyed anti-star of gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, might have borne him out. But The Deliverance Of Marlowe Billings could be amongst the best of Stuart’s fourteen albums, his toad bark voice having…

Bill Fay – Life Is People - August 2012 August 26th, 2012

Four decades since his last album proper in 1971, Bill Fay is now viewed as the great English singer-songwriter that completely got away. Fay’s much delayed difficult third album is overseen by pastoral guitarist for hire Matt Deighton, with guests including Fay’s cheerleader Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, whose debt to Fay is obvious on the slowly…

The Coal Porters – Find The One - August 2012 August 23rd, 2012

Long term Londoner and Alternative Country godfather Sid Griffin’s twenty-first century bluegrass blueprint is a nostalgic negotiation with his native Kentucky’s indigenous music. Producer John Wood brokered Fairport Convention’s sixties deals with British folk, and now he carves common ground between Carla Frey’s fleet Western Swing fiddle, Griffin’s mandolin, and his Scottish lieutenant Neil Robert…