Tag Archives: Country

The Rave-Ups: Town + Country

RaveUps_TownAndCountryOverdue reissue of country-punk-rock ‘n’ roll shoulda-beens

Originally from Pittsburgh, this hyphenate country-punk-rock ‘n’ roll band regrouped and restaffed a few times before making their mark in the clubs of Los Angeles. This 1985 full-length debut was a college radio hit, and led to a high profile appearance in the film Pretty in Pink (but not, alas, on the soundtrack album), and a deal with Epic. Their major label debut, The Book of Your Regrets, failed to capitalize on the band’s momentum, and after an uptick with their third album, Chance, the band was dropped, and broke up a few month later. But not before providing TV’s David Silver the soundtrack for his contest-winning dance moves on the Spring Dance episode of Beverly Hills 90210.

The band’s Epic albums were previously reissued as a two-fer, but their debut EP and album for the Fun Stuff label have remained maddeningly out of print. Until now. The vault door has finally swung wide open, providing not only the album’s original ten tracks, but eleven bonuses that include live radio performances and material produced by Steve Berlin and Mark Linett for a scrapped second album. Over 78 minutes of vintage Rave Ups that sounds as vital today as it did thirty (30!) years ago. Stephen Barncard’s production has none of the big studio sounds that have prematurely aged so many mid-80s records, and the band’s timeless rock ‘n’ roll foundation was cannily woven with potent threads of country, punk and blues.

“Positively Lost Me” opens the album with a memorable rhythm guitar lick and the boastful kiss-off “you lost a lot when you lost me.” The bravado appears to crack as the forfeiture is inventoried in a pedestrian list of ephemera (“six paperback books and a dying tree”), but it’s a setup, as the real price is lost confidence and broken trust. Singer-songwriter Jimmer Podrasky was full of great lyrics and catchy vocal hooks, and the band stretched themselves to find deep pockets for his songs. There’s a punk rock edge to the square-dance call “Remember (Newman’s Lovesong)” and the Beach Boys pastiche “In My Gremlin,” and an improbable demo of “If I Had a Hammer” is cannily wed to a La Bamba beat.

The Dylanish “Class Tramp” (which is about breeding rather than schooling) is complemented by a cover of Dylan’s “You Ain’t Going Nowhere,” and the album closes on a rockabilly note with “Rave-Up/Shut-Up.” The bonuses include radio performances of “Positively Lost Me” and Merle Travis’ rewrite of Charlie Bowman’s “Nine Pound Hammer,” early versions of songs that turned up as B-sides and later LPs, and several titles that never turned up again. There’s some excellent material here, but the album, recorded in stolen moments in A&M’s studios, is the fully polished gem. The Rave-Ups deserved more success than fickle industry winds blew their way, but at least Omnivore’s reissue blows this terrific debut back into print. [©2016 Hyperbolium]

Jimmer Podrasky’s Home Page

Jerry Lee Lewis: Rockin’ My Life Away

JerryLeeLewis_RockinMyLifeAwayJerry Lee’s late-70s/early-80s country hits on Elektra

There’s some sort of twisted justice in Jerry Lee Lewis’ having survived his own hard living to produce both personal and professional longevity. Rejected by Nashville, he built foundational rock ‘n’ roll pillars at Sun, faded at Smash, rebuilt himself as a country star in the late ‘60s, rode a wave of nostalgia in the ‘70s, faded from the country charts, and regained critical acclaim with late-70s and early-80s records for Elektra. It’s these latter recordings that are the subject of this fourteen track collection, highlighted by his eight charting singles (including the double A-side “Rockin’ My Life Away” b/w “I Wish I Was Eighteen Again”), and select album tracks.

His eighteen months on Elektra produced three studio albums and a greatest hits collection, and though the production has the clean sound of the era, nothing Lewis recorded ever really sounded clean. In addition to songs by Sonny Throckmorton, Charlie Rich, Bill Mize, Johnny Cash and Roger Miller, Lewis also picked songs from Arthur Alexander, Bob Dylan, and even tackled “Toot, Toot, Tootsie, Goodbye” and “Over the Rainbow.” It’s a mark of Lewis’ stylistic strength that even the most outside of these songs succumbed to his country and rock charms. Reissues of the original Elektra albums [1 2 3] provide a deeper helping, but this sampler is a great place to get an earful of highlights. [©2016 Hyperbolium]

Jerry Lee Lewis’ Home Page

The Bo-Keys: Heartaches by the Number

BoKeys_HeartachesByTheNumberSouled-out country bridges Memphis and Nashville

Imagine if the two hundred miles separating Nashville and Memphis hadn’t birthed two entirely separate musical cultures. As if the country songwriters of the former had more freely shopped their material among the blues and soul musicians of the latter. That’s the premise of the Bo-Keys third album, as they give songs by Harlan Howard, Curly Putnam, Hank Williams and Freddy Fender a spin down Beale Street and on a road trip to Muscle Shoals. Traveling beyond Nashville, the soul transformation roams West for Merle Haggard’s early album track “The Longer You Wait,” and East (albeit, via Nashville Skyline) for Bob Dylan’s “I Threw It All Away.”

The Bo-Keys aren’t the first to put a soulful spin on these song; Swamp Dogg’s “Don’t Take Her (She’s All I Got)” started as a soul side before turning country, as did Curly Putnam’s “Set Me Free,” which had been given soulful treatments by Charlie Rich, Joe Tex, Van & Grace and Esther Phillips before Ferlin Husky took it to the Nashville mainstream. Even closer, Little Richard gave “I’m So Lonesome I Could Die” the full Stax treatment on 1971’s King of Rock and Roll. None of which takes away from the Bo-Keys creativity, but helps show that great songs can stand apart from the genre in which they were birthed. Floyd Cramer’s “Last Date,” for example, is equally compelling when shifted here from piano and strings to guitar and horns.

The opening “Heartaches By the Number” hangs on to its Ray Price beat, and though Johnny Tillotson added horns in an earlier cover, guest vocalist Don Bryant makes the song’s heartbreak darker. The band’s regular vocalist, Percy Wiggins, sings soulfully throughout, but really nails the spoken sections of “Set Me Free” with an edginess that reveals the song’s desperation. Eric Lewis’ pedal steel adds country notes to “The Longer You Wait,” but Wiggins’ vocal and the horn chart keep the song rooted in Memphis. The album’s two originals, “Learned My Lesson in Love” and “I Hope You Find What You’re Looking For,” fit musically and thematically with the covers, and fill out a great album full of jukebox heartbreak. [©2016 Hyperbolium]

The Bo-Keys’ Home Page

Jimbo Mathus: Band of Storms

JimboMathus_BandOfStormsFunky southern odds ‘n’ sods

Mathus has suggested that this twenty-three minute, nine-song EP, gathers errata from his brain; and given the stylistic diversity – Stones-ish rock, second-line stomp, Cash-styled country, garage punk, dark blues and string-backed hollers – he seems to be right. He caroms from style to style, but it’s held together with a soulful looseness that makes the uptempo numbers celebratory and the darker songs more leer than threat. Well, except for the tortured murder ballad “Stop Your Crying,” which is plenty threatening. “Massive Confusion” sounds like Springsteen busting out someone’s well-loved ‘60s B-side, yet it’s a fantastic original, and “Wayward Wind” suggests what Tom Waits might have sounded like had he woken up on the other side of Nashville’s tracks. Mathus is an expressive singer, letting his voice run freely to its edges and pulling back for the confessional “Slow Down Sun.” Several songs fade early, with the cork stuffed in the production bottle as soon as the lightning was captured. The brevity crystallizes the moments of inspiration, but also omits the usual musical resolutions. The songs aren’t as riddled with Southern talismen as earlier releases, but the closing “Catahoula” leaves no mistaking Mathus’ origins. [©2016 Hyperbolium]

Jimbo Mathus’ Home Page

Dave Insley: Just the Way That I Am

DaveInsley_JustTheWayThatIAmA modern, deadpan spin on classic country heartache

Dave Insley’s latest album – his fourth – is full of loss and waiting. Waiting for the phone to ring. Waiting for a change of mind. Waiting to feel better. His deadpan delivery is both stalwart and ironic as the boozy night of “Drinking Wine and Staring at the Phone” is as much a songwriter’s document of a protagonist’s lament as as it is the protagonist’s actual lament. Someone else might drown in the heartbreak, but Insley wears his misery as a badge, and the bouncy beat, sliding trombone and barroom piano provide comic ballast. He commiserates with Kelly Willis on the duet “Win-Win Situation for Losers,” but the slightest vocal hiccup offers a crack through which his lack of passion can be seen.

Insley’s pleas are open ended, with the mild protestations of “Call Me If You Ever Change Your Mind” undercut by the title’s second (or likely fifth or sixth) chance. Waiting turns to expectation as “Footprints in the Snow” anticipates memories before they’ve even been made. Memories don’t just linger in Insley’s world, they threaten in advance, and hearts don’t so much break as they ache endlessly. But as much as he describes his pain and loneliness, the wounds are more shellshock than tears. He’s a ghost who can’t bring himself to haunt on “No One to Come Home To,” and the imagined demise of “Dead and Gone,” with a guest vocal tag from Dale Watson, brings forth humor and solace rather than sorrow.

The album departs from waiting on heartache in its latter third, with the family portrait “We’re All Together Because of You,” the philosophical “Just the Way That I Am” and fatalistic “Everything Must Last.” The horns, accordion and trail rhythm of “Arizona Territory 1904” echo Marty Robbins’ gunfighter ballads, while the lyric retells Robbins’ “Big Iron” from the outlaw’s point of view. It’s a good example of Insley’s songwriting craft and understated vocal style, which are backed throughout the album by Redd Volkaert (whose electric guitar on “Call Me If You Ever Change Your Mind” is truly inspired), Rick Shea, Danny B. Harvey, Bobby Snell, Beth Chrisman and others. It’s been eight years since he uncorked West Texas Wine, but the new vintage was worth the wait. [©2016 Hyperbolium]

Dave Insley’s Home Page

Chris Robley: The Great Make Believer

ChrisRobley_TheGreatMakeBelieverHanging on to hanging on

Whatever else he’s done, Chris Robley’s bi-coastal habitation of Portland, Oregon and Portland, Maine positions him as the answer to a singer-songwriter trivia question. It’s the sort of poetic, yet easily consumed detail that also threads through his songwriting. And though his poetry is filled with imagery and symbolism, his lyrics follow more traditional narratives, albeit with the observational details and sensitivity of a poet. Robley’s sixth album was written and recorded amid major life changes – including divorce, relocation and romantic renewal – and though the songs aren’t directly autobiographical, it’s easy to spot a very real path of anxiety, confusion, sadness, depression, weariness, relief and rebirth, sewn together by hints of optimism and a helping of catharsis.

Perhaps the most important musical change from previous releases is Robley’s choice to relinquish most of the instrumental duties to bandmates. Where his earlier albums had been insular, overdubbed studio productions, his latest relies not only on other players, but the dynamism of live recording and the shucking of orchestration and production tricks. Though much of the album draws its melodic tint from Robley’s long-time pop inspirations (i.e., the Beatles), several of the songs are stripped to country-tinged basics, with Paul Brainard’s steel and Bob Dunham’s guitar given prominent placement. Their twang pushes Robley to preach on “Lonely People” and underlines the sort of introspective reflections you’d rather not have staring back at you from the mirror.

The album opens with “Eden,” a moment of renewal spurred by the realization that mistakes are the fuel of improvement. The story then rewinds to follow the path of destruction that led to understanding. The betrayals are largely passive, with relationships quietly abandoned and allowed to disintegrate; but the wrong-doings nag the conscience and provoke the sleepless nights of “Evangeline.” The seemingly cheery recovery of “Lonely People” is turned back by self-doubt and apologies geared more to the sender than the recipient. “Silently” closes the album with the no-fault observation that even the brightest fires expire silently. The song’s old-timey vocal and kazoo solo are nice touches, and just two of the album’s many charms. [©2016 Hyperbolium]

Chris Robley’s Home Page

Bruce Robison & Kelly Willis: Today I Started Loving You Again

If you’re going to pay tribute to a fellow musician, there’s no better way to say it than with music.

Bruce Robison & Kelly Willis – Vocals
Warren Hood – Fiddle
Scott Davis – Banjo
David Grissom – Guitar
Kelley Mickwee – Background Vocals
Geoff Queen – Steel Guitar
Dom Fischer (Wood & Wire) – Bass
Trevor Nealon (The Band of Heathens) – Keys

Brian Ritchey: Bordeaux

BrianRitchey_BordeauxFollowing Justin Townes Earle’s advice to “write what you know”

Nashvillian Brian Ritchey has been something of a chameleon as he’s rambled through Americana (E.P.), garage pop and singer-songwriter crooning (If I Were a Painter), and even an ambitious concept album (No Way Out of This House). It’s a sophisticated. disparate catalog threaded with a Southern sensibility that links to this latest full-length release. His earlier notes of Americana, garage blues, soul and singer-songwriter are here, alongside twangier bits of country and hummable pop-rock, but the arrangements are more straightforward and more quickly ingratiating than his last outing.

The songs suggest the Band (“Victory March”), canyon country (“We’re Just Wrong”), Pet Sounds-era Beach Boys (the clip-clop waltz time of “Someone Else”) and even Screaming Jay Hawkins (“Rest My Head”). Ritchey sings of yearning, getting by, breaking away and moving on, and his downbeat topics will surprise those who first latch onto his incredibly hummable hooks. The album strikes defiant notes with “I’m Not Gone” and “Not Today,” but Ritchey more often seems to grapple with a world he can only react to rather than impact, turning autobiographical seeds into compelling vignettes that could just as easily be the listener’s truth as they are the singer’s. [©2016 Hyperbolium]

Brian Ritchey’s Home Page

Bob Woodruff: The Year We Tried to Kill the Pain

BobWoodruff_TheYearWeTriedToKillThePainA 1990s Nashville artist finds his soul down a rough road

Singer-songwriter Bob Woodruff garnered good notices for his mid-90s major label country albums Dreams & Saturday Nights and Desire Road, and then fell largely out of sight. He finally resurfaced for an indie album in 2011, and recorded and released the original version of this album in Sweden in 2013. Luckily, Woodruff’s soul- and country-tinged rock is timeless, and a 2016 reintroduction to this release is as welcome as the less-widely circulated first blush three years ago. Returning to music after several years of hard living, Woodruff not only sounds seasoned, but full of life experience to funnel into both the words and melodic tone of his songs.

As good as Woodruff’s originals are – and we’ll get to those in a minute – his slow, country-soul crawl through the Supremes’ “Stop in the Name of Love” is revelatory. The song’s opening guitar figure gives no clue as to what’s coming, but as Woodruff launches into the lyric’s plea with a slight hitch in his voice, the guitar turns to chords whose familiarity will provoke the listener’s memory. The tempo is similar to Jonell Mosser’s cover from the film Hope Floats, but underlined by Clas Olofsson’s pedal steel, Woodruff’s vocal mourns a relationship that’s already finished, rather than one that might be saved through confrontation. Among the song’s many varied renditions, this one’s a tour de force.

Woodruff sounds a bit like Bob Delevante, and a bit like Willie Nile, pulling in rock, country, soul and blues influences that range from the Byrdsian “I’m the Train” to the New Orleans funk “Bayou Girl” to the crooned southern soul “There’s Something There.” The opening “I Didn’t Know” strikes a tone of recovery, with happy memories reawakened by a second chance. The title song recounts rougher years, resolving to remember the past without getting stuck in its decaying trajectory. Woodruff longs for connection to others, to a better self, to a past whose fissures were of his own making, and most of all, to the salvation of hope.

The path from self-pity to self-examination to self-confidence is drawn in the personal reckoning of “So Many Teardrops,” with a breakdown that keys the song’s emotional turn, and the album closes with an impromptu live performance of the wishful “If I Were Your Man.” One might think the album’s material is solely a product of Woodruff’s wilderness years, but several of the songs, including the title track, are drawn from his earlier albums. The repurposed material is transformed by its distance from ‘90s Nashville, freed from the confines of the city’s sound. This is the record Woodruff had in him twenty years ago, but not yet the miles on his soul or the independent distribution to deliver. [©2016 Hyperbolium]

Bob Woodruff’s Home Page

Paul Burch: Meridian Rising

PaulBurch_MeridianRisingInspired fictionalized autobiography of Jimmie Rodgers

Paul Burch’s semi-fictional autobiography of Jimmie Rodgers isn’t nostalgic, it’s of a piece with the era it essays. His song cycle captures Rodgers’ times in a long form album that is, in today’s per-track streaming world, its own throwback. Burch knits together the sites, sounds, people and places that greeted Rodgers as he rode the rails and traversed the highways that led to tent shows, recording studios and international fame. The story follows Rodgers from his boyhood home of Meridian, Mississippi to his untimely death in New York City, creating an autobiography that Burch characterizes as “honest, but not necessarily true.”

The songs weave a loose narrative arc, but the album is best experienced as an immersive kaleidoscope of sounds and images. The stories take the listener traveling with Rodgers as he gains experience and channels it into creating folk, country, ragtime, blues and early jazz. The album’s guitar, bass, fiddle and drums, are augmented by clarinet, saxophone, trombone, tuba, bouzouki and Hawaiian steel guitar, fleshing out the wide world of music with which Rodgers’ communed. The arrangements swell and narrow in instrumentation, further echoing the range of combos with which Rodgers himself recording.

The nostalgic memories of Meridian that open the album quickly disappear in the rearview mirror as Rodgers hits the road in his V16 Cadillac. Burch maps Rodgers’ path through travelling shows, backstage surprises, depression-era social politics, gambling misfortune and a child’s untimely death. “To Paris (With Regrets)” imagines Rodgers longing to visit the City of Light, while the latter third of the album finds Rodgers’ health and commercial fortunes spiraling to their end. The instrumental transition “Sign of Distress” signals the beginning of the end, but there’s one more day of life as Rodgers visits Coney Island in “Fast Fuse Mama,” and life after death in the apologetic letter home, “Sorry I Can’t Stay.”

The story concludes with “Back to the Honky Tonks,” echoing Rodgers farewell in his last recording for Victor, and the album closes with the recessional “Oh, Didn’t He Ramble.” It’s a bittersweet end to Rodgers’ short, blazing trail of success and Burch’s deftly imagined autobiography. In telling this story, Burch has surrounded himself with top-notch instrumentalists, including Jen Gunderman, Fats Kaplin, Tim O’Brien and Garry Tallent, and guest vocalists Billy Bragg and Jon Langford. This is a terrific, original project whose nuanced execution lives up to its grandly inspired conception. [©2016 Hyperbolium]

Paul Burch’s Home Page