Tag Archives: Country

Matraca Berg: The Dreaming Fields

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A hit songwriter’s return to performing

It’s been fourteen years – entirely too long – since songwriter Matraca Berg recorded her last commercially released album, 1997’s Sunday Morning to Saturday Night. Though she’s never found the chart-topping success as a singer that she’s scored as a writer (having penned “Wrong Side of Memphis” for Trisha Yearwood, “Wild Angels” for Martina McBride, “You Can Feel Bad” for Patty Loveless and “Strawberry Wine” for Deana Carter, among dozens of other hit singles and album tracks), critics and fans have treasured her original performances. Unfortunately, when her former label (Rising Tide) closed shop in 1998, her last album found critical accolades that went unmatched by sales, and she returned to writing (including songs for the theatrical production Good Ol’ Girls), live performance and background singing.

Berg’s latest set shows off her talent for writing deeply personal songs that touch intimate, individual memories in each listener. Her songwriting craft and soulful performances suggest a modern-day Carole King, but one flowering at a time when music discovery has become highly balkanized. The funnel of country radio has narrowed further in the last decade, and the channels of indie promotion have simultaneously multiplied and fragmented. Berg’s songs have always been thoughtful, but her lyrics have become more allusive and her performances more subtle and introspective, necessitating longer exposure than a ten-second Pandora needle-drop or snippets woven into an NPR review. Whether her new album gets the hearing it deserves will depend in large part on word-of-mouth from her fans.

Writing in mid-life, the youthful optimism and wistful nostalgia of her earlier songs have taken a backseat to more realistic endings. The album’s title track is a somber elegy for her grandfather’s farm, one in which the golden hues of yesterday share space with the overgrowth and rust of today. The Hollywood dreams of a small town girl in “Silver and Glass” reveal themselves as fading illusions as age presents its inevitable transformations in the mirror. Even Berg’s beloved cherubs, which served as guardians in 1995’s “Wild Angels” (a chart-topper for Martina McBride), have matured into escorts for a bittersweet final journey in “Racing the Angels.” Only 2002’s “Oh Cumberland” (originally recorded with Emmylou Harris for the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s Will the Circle Be Unbroken, Vol. 3, revels unabashedly in the warmth of memories.

Berg contemplates the attraction of dangerous liaisons in “You and Tequila” (co-written with Deana Carter, and recently released as a single by Kenny Chesney and Grace Potter), but when vulnerability turns into deceit, a serial cheater’s dalliances catch up to him in the foreboding “Ode to Billy Joe” styled “Your Husband’s Cheating on Us.” Berg’s a deft author of characters, including a battered woman taking a stand and a mother coping with the inexplicable loss of a soldier son; but her best character is often herself. She closes with the ballad “A Cold, Rainy Morning in London in June,” evoking her longing for home and her comfort in having a home to long for. It’s a contemplative, yet passionate finish to an album woven from multiple strands of deep emotion and strong expression. [©2011 hyperbolium dot com]

Matraca Berg’s Home Page

Burns & Poe: Burns & Poe

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Nashville country duo sings with terrific passion

Keith Burns (previously of Trick Pony) and Michelle Poe form this unabashedly mainstream Nashville duet, but beneath the grooming, market trending and AOR production, you can hear real passion in their vocals. Burns sings with the husked edge of Don Hensley (and the chiseled looks of a model) while Poe has a clear, soulful tone that works both as a lead and harmony voice. Their material doesn’t break any new ground – sunny days, broken hearts, the healing power of love and a man’s love of trucks – but their talent and enthusiasm are truly infectious. Beyond the singles (“Don’t Get No Better Than That,” “How Long is Long Enough?” and “Second Chance”) there are many rewarding album tracks, including the sharp kiss-off “Life’s Too Short” and the bluesy rocker “Gone as All Get Out.” The fourteen tracks are split between two CDs, with the second disc given over to duet arrangements. The latter disc opens with the conversational back-and-forth of “Second Chance” and culminates in a live medley that salutes Kenny & Dolly, David & Shelly and Sonny & Cher. Producer Mark Oliverius balances the interests of radio and roots, mixing big guitars with quieter twang (including some chiming 12-string on “Move On”), showcasing the vocalists on everything from power ballads to gentle weepers. Burns and Poe are talented singers with an artistic vision that’s polished, but not subverted, by Nashville’s commercial demands. [©2011 hyperbolium dot com]

MP3 | Second Chance
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Where in the world is Richard Buckner’s next record?

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It’s been five years since Richard Buckner release his last album, Meadow. Five years filled with crushed opportunities, murderous accusations, larceny and equipment failure. Finally, on August 2nd, Our Blood, hits the shelves in both digital and analog form. Here’s the press release:

Since 2006’s Meadow, fans of Richard Buckner have been clamoring for new material and wondering what was keeping their hero from releasing the new songs he would perform on the road. Well, it’s a long story!

First, there was the score to a film that never happened. Then there was a brief brush with the law over a headless corpse in a burned-out car that had all eyes in Buckner’s small hometown in upstate New York turned toward him and his long-suffering truck. Shortly after a move to a safer, less popular corpse dumping ground, the death of his tape machine led to yet another reboot. After Richard called in pedal steel and percussion players and put new mixes on his laptop, his new “safer” place was burglarized. Goodbye, laptop.

Buckner says: “Eventually, the recording machine was resuscitated and some of the material was recovered. Cracks were patched. Parts were redundantly re-invented. Commas were moved. Insinuations were re-insinuated until the last percussive breaths of those final OCD utterances were expelled like the final heaves of bile, wept-out long after the climactic drama had faded to a somber, blurry moment of truth and voilà!, the record was done, or, let us be clear, abandoned like the charred shell of a car with a nice stereo.”

And so finally, we present Our Blood, to be released on CD and LP on August 2, 2011. This is the first Richard Buckner album to be released on vinyl!

Check out this track from the upcoming album.

MP3 | Traitor
Richard Buckner’s Home Page

Tara Nevins: Wood and Stone

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Nevins explores her country and Cajun roots

Nevins’ second solo album (her first since 1999’s Mule to Ride) hangs on to the rootsy underpinnings of her musical day job with Donna the Buffalo, but cuts a looser, more soulful country groove than does her long-time group. Without a co-vocalist sharing the microphone, Nevins’ voice carries the album, and without a second writer, her songs stretch out across all her influences, including fiddle- and steel-lined country, second line rhythms and the Cajun sounds of her earlier band, the Heartbeats. The latter appear together on the energetic fiddle tune “Nothing Really,” and individually on several other tracks. Additional guests include Levon Helm (drumming on two tracks), Allison Moorer (tight trio harmony with Teresa Williams on “The Wrong Side”) and Jim Lauderdale (harmony on the acoustic “Snowbird”).

Producer Larry Campbell fits each song with a unique groove and adds superb electric and pedal steel guitar. The girlishness in Nevins’ voice and the layering of double-tracked vocals add a hint of the Brill Building, which is a terrific twist on the rustic arrangements. The lyrics cast an eye on relationships that refuse to live up to their potential, with music that underlines the certainty of a woman who will no longer suffer others’ indecision, inaction or infidelity. Three deftly picked covers include the standard “Stars Fell on Alabama” (from the film 20 Years After), the traditional “Down South Blues,” and Van Morrison’s “Beauty of Days Gone By.” Campbell and Nevins work some real magic here, creating a musical platform that often feels a more crafted fit for Nevins’ singing than that of her long-time group. [©2011 hyperbolium dot com]

MP3 | Wood and Stone
Tara Nevins’ MySpace Page
Donna the Buffalo’s Home Page

Owen Temple: Mountain Home

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Country, folk, bluegrass and blues from talented Texas songsmith

Owen Temple’s last album, Dollars and Dimes, took its concept from the socio-political ideas of Joel Garreau’s The Nine Nations of North America. Temple wrote songs that explored the regional ties of work and cultural belief that often transcend physical geography, zeroing in on the life issues that bind people together. With his newest songs, he’s still thinking about people, but individuals this time, catching them as a sociologist would in situations that frame their identity in snapshots of hope, fear, prejudice, heroism, and the shadows of bad behavior and disaster. As on his previous album, his songs are rooted in actual places – isolated communities that harbor dark secrets and suffocating intimacy, a deserted oil town lamented as a lost lover, a legendary red-light district, and the Texas troubadours in whose footsteps he follows. The album’s lone cover, Leon Russell’s “Prince of Peace,” is offered in tribute to a primary influence.

Temple’s songs are sophisticated and enlightening, offering a view of the Texas west that’s akin to Dave Alvin’s meditations on mid-century California. He writes with a folksinger’s eye, observing intimate, interior details of every day life, and painting big, mythological sketches of Sam Houston and Cabeza de Vaca. The latter, “Medicine Man,” was co-written with Gordy Quist, and recently recorded by Quist’s Band of Heathens. Temple’s music stretches into country, bluegrass, gospel and blues, and he sings with the confidence of a writer who deeply trusts his material. Gabriel Rhodes’ production is spot-on throughout the album, giving Temple’s songs and vocals the starring roles, but subtly highlighting the instrumental contributions of Charlie Sexton, Rick Richards, Bukka Allen and Tommy Spurlock. Temple has made several fine albums, but taking intellectual input from Garreau seems to have clarified and deepened his own songwriting voice. This is an album that ingratiates itself on first pass, and  reveals deep new details with each subsequent spin. [©2011 hyperbolium dot com]

MP3 | One Day Closer to Rain
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Holly Golightly and the Brokeoffs: No Help Coming

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Country and blues reflected in a cracked funhouse mirror

Holly Golightly and the Brokeoffs (comprised of Golightly and multi-instrumentalist Lawyer Dave) continue to mash the hard-charging folk dynamic of Richard & Mimi Farina with a primitive (rather than the oft-labeled lo-fi), live-sounding recording aesthetic. The percussion prevalent on 2008’s Dirt Don’t Hurt continues to add punctuation, giving several of these tracks, such as the exotic “Burn, Oh Junk Pile, Burn,” the off-kilter feel of mid-period Tom Waits. But these blues are more hill-bred than Bowery, and the jittery twang of the title track will make you wonder what the Feelies would have sounded like if they’d grown up in Tennessee instead of New Jersey. Golightly croons a few tunes, and though it gets low and dark for “The Rest of Your Life,” the girlishness in her voice lightens what could be a Screamin’ Jay Hawkins track. Lawyer Dave hollers his tale of a summertime DUI, “You’re Under Arrest” and the duo comes together for a cover of Bill Anderson’s “Lord Knows We’re Drinking.” The album closes with a psych-tinged, foot-stomping take on Wendell Austin’s bizarre country novelty, “L.S.D. (Rock ‘n’ Roll Prison),” which may just explain the uniqueness of the Brokeoffs’ cracked country and blues sound. [©2011 hyperbolium dot com]

MP3 | No Help Coming
Holly Golightly and the Brokeoffs Facebook Page
Holly Golightly and the Brokeoffs MySpace Page

Slithering Beast: Delicious

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Punchy country soul from Louisville quintet

Slithering Beast is a Kentucky five-piece that formed around singer/songwriter/guitarist, Nick Dittmeier. Though Dittmeier initially explored country and honky-tonk as respites from years of punk rock, the group has evolved a blend that pulls in the Southern soul of Wet Willie, the funky blues roots of Little Feat, some Muscle Shoals-styled horns and even a few moments of Allman-esque guitar and E-street saxophone. You can hear the band’s country-rock roots in “You/Me” and a bit of Bobby Fuller in the closing “Everywhere I Go.” This five-song EP is mixed with the punch of AM radio and the melodic hooks to earn it, but also enough rough-edges to keep things down home. It’s not clear if the band’s name really sells the rootsy warmth of their music, but a fourteen-minute spin through this new EP will tell you what you need to know. [©2011 hyperbolium dot com]

MP3 | Fool Out of You
MP3 | You/Me
Stream Delicious on Bandcamp
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Rod Rogers and the Travis Jay Jones Orchestra: Las Vegas Souvenir

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Las Vegas-themed song-poem concept album

The world of song-poems is one in which an amateur songwriter’s lyric (or “song-poem”) is run through a music mill’s assembly line of melody, arrangement, performance and recording. The result is a stack of singles, albums, cassettes or CDs delivered to the aspiring songsmith, and not much else. These are vanity recordings for which the recording company has no marketing plan and no expectation of profit beyond the few hundred dollars “seed money” paid by the lyricist. A deep underground of song-poem collectors have churned out album compilations [1 2 3 4] and websites like the American Song-Poem Music Archives, that collect the best (and the best of the worst) records and shine some much deserved light on the industry’s more interesting characters.

The genre’s unparalleled superstar is Rodd Keith, an arranger, musician and vocalist whose productions often managed to transcend the banal lyrics with which he had to work. Keith recorded under a number of aliases, including this album’s Rod Rogers. This full-length LP appears to be a vanity recording, but it’s not entirely clear for whom. The bulk of the songs are credited to combinations of Jones, Riley and Vandenburg. Bandleader Travis Jay Jones is also listed as the president of the record label, Planet Earth, itself a division of Travis Jay Jones Enterprises. So one might guess that Jones was the recording mill’s proprietor, and Riley was the funding songwriter; or Jones was the songwriter and Riley or Vandenburg were the arrangers. In a large sense it doesn’t matter, as part of the charm of song-poem records is their everyman anonymity.

These are top-notch song-poem productions, featuring a tight pop combo of guitar, bass, drums, piano and odd instrumental touches likely produced by Keith’s Chamberlin. The lyrics are notable for their lack of polish – phrases that don’t quite fit the rhythm, moon-spoon-June rhymes, half-baked similes and oddly fantastic word choices. But wedded to catchy melodies (several of which lean to country-and-western) and Keith’s talanted singing, these productions are surprisingly memorable. The song cycle finds the album’s protagonist welcomed to Las Vegas with an invitation to gamble and drink that quickly leads to empty pockets. Along the way he encounters Sin City staples: lucky charms, neon lights, nightlife, quickie weddings, and (twice, yet) fortune tellers. There’s little here to make you forget “Viva Las Vegas,” but you’ll be hard-pressed to get “Lucky Vegas Gamblin’ Man” out of your head. [©2011 hyperbolium dot com]

See the PBS documentary Off the Charts: The Song-Poem Story

The Band of Heathens: Top Hat Crown & The Clapmaster’s Son

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Austin quintet lays down another slab of funky country soul

Settling into their third studio album, this Austin quintet’s gumbo of funk, soul, blues, gospel, country and rock may no longer be a surprise, but it’s just as entertaining as on their previous outings. Better yet, having toured extensively, fans can imagine how the concise jams of these four-minute songs will play out on stage. Little Feat, the Band, the Jayhawks and the rootsy side of the Grateful Dead remain touchstones, but working across multiple genres with three singer/songwriters and a solid rhythm section, the band creates their own unique sound. The Gulf Coast is much on the songwriters’ minds as they harmonize for a cover of “Hurricane” and ruminate on the nonchalant consumerism underlying the Deepwater Horizon oil spill on “Free Again.” There are touches of Dr. John’s New Orleans funk in “Enough,” echoes of Memphis in the horn chart of “The Other Broadway” and a riff on “I Ain’t Running” that echoes War’s “Spill the Wine.” The set closes on a rustic note with the vocalists trading verses for the acoustic gospel “Gris Gris Satchel.” The album feels more like a moment of artistic consolidation than a new step forward, but the group’s breadth of influences and depth of musical grooves are still fresh and rewarding. [©2011 hyperbolium dot com]

MP3 | Polaroid
Stream Top Hat Crown & The Clapmaster’s Son
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Daniel Romano: Sleep Beneath the Willow

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Lee Hazlewood meets Gram Parsons

Lee Hazlewood or Gram Parsons? A little of each, with a hint of Johnny Cash’s gravitas thrown in for good measure. On the opening number Daniel Romano sings in the deadpan style of Hazlewood, but by track two he embraces the sweet and sad melancholy of Parsons. There are low twanging guitars and period touches to suggest the former’s Phoenix years, but also slow waltzes and country-rockers that evoke the latter. At times the two combine as Romano reaches down from his middle range to darker notes at the bottom end. The ghost of Gram Parsons is inescapable, but it floats through a lot of musical variety. There are gospel harmonies, a Celtic fiddle melody and subtle organ backing for “Louise,” and the broken-hearted “Lost (For as Long as I Live),” is waltzed along by acoustic guitar strums and fiddle. The lonely “I Won’t Let It” suggests a downcast, morning-after ‘50s country ballad, and the dark lyric “there are lines in my face that don’t come from smiling” is matched by the song’s emotionally spent vocal tone. There are countrypolitan touches in the harmony backings of Misha Bower, Tamara Lindeman and Lisa Bozikovic, and several of the songs, particularly the fiddle-led “Paul and Jon,” sound as if they could have been collected by A.P. Carter. This is a fascinating record with roots both familiar and obscure. [©2011 hyperbolium dot com]

MP3 | Time Forgot (To Change My Heart)
Daniel Romano’s Home Page
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