Tag Archives: Americana

Charlie Robison: Beautiful Day

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CharlieRobison_BeautifulDayA lovable rogue laid flat by divorce

It’s been five years since we last heard from Charlie Robison. After a run on Sony’s Lucky Dog label and a live album on Columbia, Robison moved to the indie Dualtone for 2004’s Good Times. Though he continued to perform live, the CDs he’d been releasing every year or two dried up. Perhaps now we know why: in 2008 his nine-year marriage to Dixie Chick Emily Robison ended in divorce. Rather than writing through the dissolution, he saved up his emotions for this post-divorce album. Only he and his ex know if the venom is righteous, but whether it’s well-founded criticism or angry lashing-out, it still packs a sting. One takeaway: don’t leave a writer feeling you’ve wronged them.

No doubt many of these songs were written in the final throes of Robison’s marriage, but the wreckage is viewed as aftermath rather than from the eye of the hurricane. Robison charts many of the classic stages of recovery, including shock, confusion, denial, anger, depression, and uneasy acceptance. He doesn’t bother to cloak his emotions in songwriter’s allusion, but there’s artfulness in the way he opens up the main veins to purge his bitterness. Given that his marriage had officially “become insupportable because of discord or conflict of personalities,” it’s unsurprising that Robison would castigate his ex for the lightweight echo of her former self he believes she’s become, and the broken promises with which he’s left.

Robison begins his reappraisal with the title track’s scathing portrait of superficial life in Los Angeles, and continues with a bitter spit of words in “Yellow Blues.” The latter has a terrific country-psych arrangement, complete with Eastern influence, twangy and backwards guitars, and a thumping “Tomorrow Never Knows” styled bass line. The lyrics suggest that in an effort to bolster favorable public perception, Robison’s mate kept their marital problems quiet rather than facing them down. A pair of Keith Gattis songs, “Down Again” and “Reconsider,” covers the merry-go-round of depression and forlorn denial. Robison writes of self-pity, barroom self-medication, and tentative steps towards recovery, the latter is most healthily heard in the chiming mandolin and social reconnections of “Feelin’ Good.”

By album’s end Robison’s far from healed, and a defeated cover of Bruce Springsteen’s “Racing in the Street” begs the question of whether failure has permanently short-circuited opportunity and hope. While Springsteen’s lyrics could illustrate the stunted adolescence of American Graffiti’s John Milner, Robison’s version suggests he’s stepping outside his own misery to consider the broader impact of his divorce. Either way, the roguish abandon of younger years has given way to middle-age doubt and regret. This isn’t nearly as depressing as it might seem, and though the processing isn’t pretty, the raw turmoil provides Robison the basis for this powerful album. [©2009 hyperbolium dot com]

Charlie Robison’s Home Page
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Owen Temple: Dollars and Dimes

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OwenTemple_DollarsAndDimesSoulful country-folk-rock travelogue of today’s North America

Austinite Owen Temple takes inspiration for his fifth album from his extensive travels as a touring musician, and from Joel Garreau’s book The Nine Nations of North America. Garraeu argues that national and state borders are mere geographical lines that fail to surround populations of like interests and lives. He proposes nine regions, such as Ecotopia (the northwest coast), Breadbasket (the midwest US and Canada), and Foundry (the industrial northeast) that are held together by shared economic interests and cultural beliefs. He asserts that what people do (or, in the current recession, don’t do) defines their common character more clearly than borders drawn from rivers or arbitrary surveyor’s marks.

Temple explores this idea in a set of songs drawn from impressions or observations of these regions, from the rusting industrial dreams of “Broken Heart Land,” through the vast emptiness of “Black Diamond” and the title track’s study of the migrations that built and sustain America. He examines the social mobility that’s led many to wander rootlessly from metropolis to metropolis, often draining into the artificial oasis of Southern California (“Los Angeles is the city of the future, and it’s coming to get you”). He draws sharp portraits of working people whose labors are for “making a life, not just a living,” as well as those sick of their daily grind. It’s not as dark as Slaid Cleaves’ Everything You Love Will Be Taken Away, but stands on the same observational singer-songwriter ground.

There’s a very American streak of nostalgia in many of these songs, including the fictional transplants who find adopted homes not what they expected, and Temple’s own memories of his early days in Austin and later years in the frigid north turn his pen inward. This is a more studied album than 2008’s Two Thousand Miles, though it retains the same soulful folk-country sound. Temple’s stock taking creates a more personal, more interior, less archetypal version of the Americana travelogues Johnny Cash wrote in the 1960s. [©2009 hyperbolium dot com]

MP3 | Broken Heart Land
Owen Temple’s Home Page
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Ryan Bingham & The Dead Horses: Roadhouse Sun

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ryanbingham_roadhousesunPreternaturally weary and wizened country-rock

Ryan Bingham sounds more road-weary and wizened than can scarcely be imagined for a twenty-eight year old. He’s a hoarse-voiced troubadour in the mold of Dylan and Earle, a rocker in the sing-song vein of Willie Nile and Steve Forbert, a rousing melodist ala Bruce Springsteen, and a dusty Westerner (born in New Mexico, but raised in rural Texas) whose roots also touch John Mellancamp’s heartland. Like fellow Texan Jack Ingram’s early days touring the state’s elaborate network of bars and dance halls, Bingham displays an unbridled urgency to communicate with each performance. The provenance of his gravel-stained voice includes an early exit from parental supervision and hard years of independent living on the rodeo circuit. With such experiential riches, you’d expect Bingham’s songs to dig into emotional pain, fate, self-reliance, resurrection, hard work, or realized dreams, and while his band (under the baton of the Black Crowes’ Marc Ford) gives fiery and impassioned performances to match the vocals, the lyrics don’t always make as strong an impression. The dues paying “Roadhouse Blues,” for example, includes images of wanderers, badlands, freight trains and long-haul trucks that aren’t quite convincing as vivid memories. The sound of Binham’s voice and the power of his band’s playing are enough to carry this release, but listeners may be left feeling he hasn’t fully connected with his own story. There’s a great deal of emotion in this work, but it’s in the tone rather than words. That will be enough for many listeners, and played live these tunes are sure to satisfy. [©2009 hyperbolium dot com]

Hear “Dylan’s Hard Rain”
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Dave Alvin and the Guilty Women: Dave Alvin and the Guilty Women

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davealvin_guiltywomenAlvin kicks up new sparks with guilty women

Having debuted this all-female backing lineup at San Francisco’s Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival in 2008, Dave Alvin and his estrogen-packing band have waxed a gem. Christy McWilson and Amy Farris’ harmonies and duets prove compelling partners to Alvin’s baritone on an album of blues, rock, folk and a few surprises. Chief among the surprises is the Cajun fiddle and pedal steel arrangement of Alvin’s “Marie Marie,” rendered so convincingly that it will take you a second to remember the Blasters signature original. From there the group comes out blasting with the galloping electric folk-blues “California’s Burning,” an allegorical tale that provides a requiem for the Golden State’s cash-strapped coffers. Alvin and McWilson duet like Richard and Mimi Fariña here, and Cindy Cashdollar adds some fiery slide playing.

The passing of friend and bandmate Chris Gaffney was one of Alvin’s motivations for forming this alternative to his Guilty Men, and he’s obviously in a reflective, memorial mood. “Downey Girl” remembers fellow Downey high school student Karen Carpenter and in his middle age Alvin finds a sympathetic appraisal of her fame. Nostalgia for young-pup years has always threaded through Alvin’s work, and with “Boss of the Blues” he ties together a nostalgic memory of Joe Turner with Turner’s own nostalgic memories of the golden years of the blues. One of the album’s happiest and transformative memories, of being dropped off at a Jimi Hendrix concert, opens with the “Folsom Prison” rewrite, “My mother told me, be a good boy, and don’t do nothing wrong.”

Christy McWilson (Dynette Set, Pickets) sings lead on a pair of her own originals, “Weight of the World” and “Potter’s Field,” continuing the mood of struggle that pervaded her two Alvin-produced solo albums. A real standout is her up-tempo duet with Alvin on a cover of Tim Hardin’s oft-covered “Don’t Make Promises.” Alvin and McWilson have paired for ’60s covers before, notably Moby Grape’s “805” on 2002’s Bed of Roses, but this one’s extended acoustic guitar jam really hits the mark. The closing cover of “Que Sera, Sera” suggests Alvin may be ready to move past his grief, but the song’s fatalism is strangely at odds with the rocking country blues arrangement.

When he’s not fondly remembering happier times, Alvin sings low through much of the album, reaching a level of quiet introspection on “These Times We’re Living In” that brings to mind Leonard Cohen. The loss of Chris Gaffney has left a mark on Alvin, and for now at least, his music. His backing band is not just a terrifically talented quintet deeply steeped in the roots of their shared music, but a place for Alvin to rest his soul and rethink his relationship to the Guilty Men minus one. This is more than a temporary respite; it’s a revitalizing step towards artistic and personal rediscovery. [©2009 hyperbolium dot com]

MP3 | Nana and Jimi
Dave Alvin Home Page #1
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Samantha Crain & The Midnight Shivers: Songs in the Night

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samanthacrain_songsinthenightFirst full-length from riveting Oklahoma Americana folk singer

Samantha Crain is a Choctaw folk singer from rural Oklahoma whose vocal warble creates a sense of old-timey jazz. Her 2007 debut EP, The Confiscation, captured the feeling of an eerie walk along the canopied banks of a Southern Gothic river, and though this full-length isn’t as starkly foreboding, its imagery and lyrical meters remain striking and original. Crain’s gravitated from storytelling to poetic allusion, often leaving the tone and dynamics of her singing to communicate the pain, fear, confusion, despair and dislocation not transparently revealed in her words. The album is perhaps even more effective if you don’t resort to the lyric sheet. Crain continues to stretch her lyrics over the words’ rhythms, often repeating phrases in a trailing fog of lost thoughts or exclamation of suddenly realized memory. The Shivers’ Americana basics (guitar, bass, harmonica and drums) are augmented with touches of mandolin, trombone and mini-moog, remaining rustic and restrained; the slow-to-mid tempos are broken only once for the post-punk rockabilly shuffle and twang of “Bullfight (Change Your Mind).” Crain’s voice remains mystically compelling, and though her new songs haven’t the thick atmosphere of The Confiscation‘s, they’re still full of memorable images and riveting twists. [©2009 hyperbolium dot com]

Samantha Crain’s Home Page
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King Wilkie: King Wilkie Presents- The Wilkie Family Singers

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kingwilkie_singersAudacious pop concept by former bluegrass wunderkind

If you caught King Wilkie’s bluegrass debut Broke, and somehow managed to miss their break with orthodoxy on 2007’s Low Country Suite, you’re in for a really big surprise. With the original group disbanded, and founding member Reid Burgess relocated to New York City, the band’s name has been redeployed as the front for this stylistically zig-zagging concept album. The Wilkie Family Singers are an imagined co-habitating, musically-inclined family fathered by shipping magnate Jude Russell Wilkie, and filled out by a wife, six children, a cousin, two friends and two pets.

In reality the assembled group includes Burgess, longtime collaborator John McDonald, multi-instrumentalist Steve Lewis, and guest appearances by Peter Rowan, David Bromberg, John McEuen, Robyn Hitchcock, Abigail Washburn and Sam Parton. And rather than constructing a storyline or song-cycle, Burgess wrote songs that give expression to the family’s life and backstory. As he explains, “Jude Russell Wilkie, Sr. had success with a Great Lakes shipping business, and becomes the father to a great family, whose normal familial roles aren’t neatly defined as they grow older. Their insular lifestyle and wealth has them in a sort of time warp. They’re wedged in limbo between past and future. Too big to hold mom’s hand or ride on dad’s shoulders, but still somehow too small to leave their childhood house.”

Much as the Beatles used Sgt. Pepper as a backdrop to inform the mood of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Burgess works from his sketch to conjure a family photo album rather than a written history. There are snapshots of togetherness, isolation, and stolen moments of solitary time, there’s lovesick pining, unrequited longing for the larger world, lives stunted in adolescence, violent dreams and medicinal coping. The band ranges over an impressive variety of styles that include acoustic country, blues and folk, rustic Americana, Dixieland jazz, ’50s-tinged throwbacks and ’70s-styled production pop. There’s even some back-porch picking here, but this edition of King Wilkie has much grander ambitions than to embroider the bluegrass handed down by Bill Monroe. The festival circuit’s loss is pop music’s gain.

Burgess paints the family as lyrical motifs and musical colors rather than descriptive profiles. The latter might have been more immediately satisfying but would have quickly turned stagey. Instead, the family’s dynamic is spelled out in small pieces, fitting the broad range of musical styles to create an album that plays beautifully from beginning to end. The songs stand on their own, but the family’s presence is felt in the flow of the album’s tracks. Casa Nueva hits a homerun with their maiden release, and King Wilkie proves itself a daring band whose next step should be highly anticipated. [©2009 hyperbolium dot com]

MP3 | Hey Old Man
King Wilkie’s Home Page
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The Jayhawks: Smile

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jayhawks_smileThe Jayhawks fly to production land with Bob Ezrin

How you came upon the Jayhawks is likely to be the largest factor in your pleasure or displeasure with this album. If you were an acolyte of the group’s early albums, even if you enjoyed the fuller turn of Hollywood Town Hall and wider range of Tomorrow the Green Grass, there’s a good chance that the highly polished, at times synthetic, productions of Smile may be too much change for you. But if you approach this album without fretting the group’s history, you’ll find it a superb collection of melodies and arrangements that strongly echo the cross-product of craft and earthiness of many great early 1970s albums. Big Star is a touchstone, but so is Fleetwood Mac, Tom Petty, Badfinger and pre-disco Bee Gees.

Many of this album’s seeds were planted in the band’s first Gary Louris-led release, Sound of Lies, but if you can’t fathom Gary Louris double-trackinging his lead vocals in front of a small chorus of backing singers (including Karen Grotberg and producer Bob Ezrin), then the sheen of these tracks will, ironically, grate on your ears. Even those who love the classic ’70s rockisms may still puzzle over the odd synthesizer twerps Ezrin’s dropped here and there and the rudimentary drum machine patterns that provide the foundation of a few tracks. The album might have split in half had Louris’ songs not laid a consistent mood across the earthy and synthetic sounds Ezrin dabbed and layered onto the productions.

The line between a band freed and subverted by their producer is a fine one, and the latter half of the album seems to weave back and forth. The dance beat of “Queen of the World” and propulsive modern-rock of “Life Floats By” are monotonous, while “Broken Harpoon” is delicately filigreed with glistening acoustic guitars, nearly subconscious vocal echoes and a wavery synthesizer. They all represent production touches brought to the studio by Bob Ezrin, but the first two extinguish the band’s identity while the latter adds highlights. The album tends more to the latter than the former, and though longtime fans expecting rootsy Americana will blanch, this is a terrific album for pop ears. [©2009 hyperbolium dot com]

Chip Taylor and Carrie Rodriguez: Red Dog Tracks

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chiptaylor_reddogtracksTwangy, relaxed, confessional country duets

Hit songwriter Chip Taylor’s performing career is having quite a second act. Or third, or maybe fourth. After his initial foray as a singles artist netted little success in the early ‘60s, Taylor penned a string of hit titles for others (including “I Can’t Let Go,” “Wild Thing,” “Country Girl, City Man,” and “Angel of the Morning”). In the 1970s he embarked on a moderately successful second pass at recording with a string of solo works. His songwriting continued to make more headway than his performing, and at decade’s end, he retired from the music business (apparently to become a professional gambler). He resurfaced in 1996 with Hit Man, an album of newly recorded versions of songs others had made hits, and the following year returned as a contemporary songwriter with The Living Room Tapes.

What was clear from his new songs, which continued across a trio of albums on his own Train Wreck label, was that Taylor had returned to performing and writing with more rustic country intentions than with which he’d left at the end of the 1970s. The roots movement had opened up space for country-oriented singer-songwriters to lay down their wares without the interferance of anything Nashville, and that space could just as well benefit old masters as young guns. What sent Taylor’s performing career to the next level, however, was his meeting of fiddler Carrie Rodriguez. Taking her on tour as an instrumentalist and backing singer, he gradually drew her out as a duet singing partner for 2002’s Let’s Leave This Town.

This 2005 release is their third, and the chemistry that was immediate on the debut has greatly deepened. The growing confidence in their vocal interplay allows them to sing more leisurely and provides more breathing space for their music. Acoustic bassist Jim Whitney keys the band’s relaxed pace, and Bill Frisell’s guitar winds all around the vocals. Rodriguez’s fiddle is heard more as accompaniment than solo, the focus staying with the vocals and occasional instrumental flourishes. Taylor wrote most of the songs, co-writing one with Rodriguez, pulling two from Hank Williams (“My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It” and “I Can’t Help It If I’m Still in Love With You”) and one from the public domain (“Elzick’s Farewell”).

Taylor’s songs retain the folkiness of his earlier days, particularly as rendered with relaxed tempos and quiet instrumental passages that provide reflective moments between verses. The contrast of his rougher vocal tone to Rodriguez’s plaintive style works especially well as they converse in melody, employing long drawn notes and an intimate, confessional tone. The ease with which they sing together demonstrates the pairing that began as a serendipitous meeting at SXSW has blossomed into a complete partnership. [©2009 hyperbolium dot com]

Chip Taylor’s MySpace Page
Carrie Rodriguez’s MySpace Page
Train Wreck Records

Randy Weeks: Going My Way

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randyweeks_goingmywayCatchy Americana and pop from former Lonesome Stranger

Randy Weeks initially came to the public’s attention as co-leader of the twangy West Coast roots-rock group Lonesome Strangers. Their 1986 debut, Lonesome Pine, was produced by Pete Anderson, and the group played local clubs and road gigs with Dwight Yoakam, Dave Alvin and others of the Los Angeles roots-rock scene. They issued a second album in 1988, separated a few years later, and regrouped in 1997 for a one-off reunion album. Weeks subsequently embarked on a solo career that retains the group’s country-rock roots, but with more expansive and quirky explorations into pop, blue-eyed soul and southern flavors.

Singing alone, Weeks can deliver the deadpan style of Lou Reed by way of Ric Ocasek, such as with the opening “I Couldn’t Make It.” The spoken passages of “Going My Way” split the jazz-inspired style of Mark Knopfler and the quirkier readings of Northwest folkie Jim Page. But half-sung isn’t Weeks’ only speed, as the remainder of the album includes melodic country rock, blue-eyed soul and even some New Orleans grooves. Having relocated from Los Angeles to Austin, TX, Weeks was able to attract Will Sexton as producer, and pick up players that include guitarist Tony Gilkyson and drummer Rick Richards, resulting in an album of rootsy pop that brings to mind Ben Vaughn’s recent work with The Desert Classic.

Weeks writes catchy songs about love, but not always love songs. Sunny dedication and intimate secrets are balanced by mistreating mates, communication breakdowns, and relationships past their expiration date. He also writes clever tunes such as the insomnious “Little Bit of Sleep,” and the dispassionately remembered assignations of “Going My Way” Weeks offer up an Americana sequel to the Nails’ “88 Lines About 44 Women.” Touches of organ, fiddle, steel and accordion augment the core guitar, bass and drums, but even with this overt country-rock lineup, Weeks’ tuneful melodies and straight rhythms winningly make this as much pop as alt.country. [©2009 hyperbolium dot com]

MP3 | A Lot to Talk About
Randy Weeks’ Home Page
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Gurf Morlix: Last Exit to Happyland

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gurfmorlix_lastexittohappylandQuietly intense, rough-voiced, sweet-sounding Americana

Gurf Morlix has produced many of the who’s who of Americana, including Lucinda Williams, Robert Earl Keen, and Ray Wylie Hubbard. He’s added guitar to works by Buddy Miller, Jim Lauderdale, Peter Case and others, and crafted a low-key solo career starting with 2000’s Toad of Titicaca. Morlix sings with a bit of Buddy Miller’s moan and a bit of Tom Waits’ grit, but his confessional exhalations are more the parched tone of a dusty back road than the worn sidewalks of the bowery. He sings here with Patty Griffin, Barbara K and Ruthie Foster, but most impressively, he sings with his own instrumental accompaniment, as he plays everything but the drums (which, as on 2004’s Cut ‘n Shoot, are handled perfectly by Rick Richards).

In less capable hands, a one-man-studio-band can sounds manufactured, with the artist’s secondary instruments slaved in tempo and mood to their primary axe. But Morlix approaches each instrument as a native, insuring each instrument’s sound has individual depth and character as it’s blended into an organic band sound. If you didn’t know this was the product of overdubbing, you’d be inclined to think it was recorded live – such is the interplay between the “players.” The arrangements and production show the sort of sensitivity to Morlix’s songs that could easily be sacrificed in a self-contained project. It’s not unusual for a writer to hear a song’s musical concept in his or her head, but it’s much rarer for the writer to successfully play and produce that sound into reality.

The album opens with a one-time killer’s path from armament to remorseful condemnation, freeze-framing the fatal bullet’s path, examining it in lyrical detail and tagging it with the conscience-nagging chorus “one more second, was all it woulda took / another thought, a closer look / the thunder cracked, and blood ran cold / one more second, mighta saved my soul.” Morlix’s facility for description stocks “She’s a River” with a dozen metaphors, and the allusive path of “Hard Road” is set upon with the memorable introduction “I set out on my own, look out here I come / Whatever there might be, I was gonna get me some / Pure gun powder, I was ready to explode / The fuse was lit, I was out on the hard road.” That same road may be the one Morlix resolutely walks into the teeth of Hurricane Katrina in “Walkin’ to New Orleans,” and the Crescent City’s blues is heard in the restless soul, low-twang and wailing backing vocal of “Drums of New Orleans.”

The edge in Morlix’s voice works just as well against lighter backings, such as the Shel Silverstein flavored “Music You Mighta Made” and the closing duet with Patty Griffin, “Voice of Midnight.” His songs are shot through with fatalism, but their tunefulness and Morlix’s inventive production keeps this from devolving into complete darkness. This is a beautifully crafted album from a thoughtful singer-songwriter whose producer and musicians (all of whom happen to be Morlix himself) add perfect musical color to his limited, but deeply soulful, vocal range. [©2009 hyperbolium dot com]

MP3 | Hard Road
Gurf Morlix’s Home Page
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