Tag: country
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Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, Lucinda Williams (1998)
Home is an idea, a mythical place of unconditional love and unquestioned belonging. It’s also a real place filled with what’s most familiar to us—that is, the things we find most beautiful and most appalling in this wide world. The brilliance of Car Wheels on a Gravel Road is that Williams doesn’t offer resolution. She…
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Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Wilco (2002)
Every listener has their biases. I’ve just never really quite grasped 21st-century indie rock, whatever that label means. I’ve been trying and mostly failing to appreciate Arcade Fire, Grizzly Bear (or is it Panda Bear?), Vampire Weekend, etc. for two decades—these bands move many, many people, and so there must be something there, but my…
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American Band, Drive-By Truckers (2016)
Honest political art must walk the line between ambiguity and conviction. Sloganeering, no matter how righteous the fight, eventually ends in middle-aged exhaustion. This is especially the case when the tribe is the cause. No song better exemplifies the success of American Band than “Ever South,” an odd mix of (Irish-)European pride and settler confessional.…
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Ola Wave, Zane Campbell (2017)
Zane Campbell is the real deal. A royal Appalachian music bloodline, a life torn apart by drink and drugs, undeniable lyrical genius, a refusal to conform to country-music-as-beer-commercial. What does it all amount to? Maybe nothing more sitting on a torn recliner in the yard with a scruffy guitar in hand, singing your heart out…
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Soul Journey, Gillian Welch (2003)
Critics generally regard Gillian Welch’s third album, Soul Journey, as an artistic lull. I disagree. The dominant themes of her other early albums—Revival‘s wistfulness, Hell Among the Yearlings‘ gothic grimness, Time (the Revelator)‘s nostalgic cool—rely on more powerful human emotions than the lightness of Soul Journey. But lightness can also be deep. It’s the sensation…