Archive for the New Stuff / What’s On Sale Category

Arcade Fire’s fifth LP Everything Now opens with its title track, twice. The first version, logged under the name “Everything_Now (Continued),” lasts for just under one woozy minute, and it in no way prepares the listener for what’s to come. When the dirgelike intro gives way to the full five-minute “Everything Now,” the explosion of joyous rhythm, infectious melody, and disco glitz is unexpected—but, boy, is it ever welcome. The album that follows has a lot more in common with the “fun” take on its opening song than the more plaintive, somber one. While both iterations of “Everything Now” feel like a natural progression from the arty world-beat/dance-fever experiments of 2013’s Reflektor, placing these two tracks back-to-back at the start of Everything Now almost feels like a gesture of reassurance to longtime fans. “Relax,” the band is saying. “This album won’t be as difficult as the last one.”

The notion of being Barefoot In The Head perfectly expresses the enduring hippie instincts of Chris Robinson’s prolific band. It also conveys the laidback rustic stoner vibe of this latest album, on which keening steel guitar and country harmonies in songs like “Blonde Light Of Morning” and “If You Had A Heart To Break” locates them squarely in the Laurel Canyon lineage. But unlike most of their country-rock forefathers, Robinson’s blues-rock background gives the CRB a soulful edge evident here in the funk shuffle “Behold The Seer”, where liquid guitar licks and quacking clavinet carry his invocation to “put on your dancing shoes, we got nothing to lose, it’s only space and time.”

atie Crutchfield, the Alabama-born singer-songwriter behind Waxahatchee, has always tended towards introspection. Over the course of three well received albums, she has traded in the sort of laceratingly honest indie that to the listener feels horribly, yet compellingly intimate. So, the news that album number four is a breakup album, recorded, per the press release, “amidst the dissolution of a noxious relationship”, could cause some concern.

Over four decades and tens of thousands of road miles after singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Randall Bramblett released his first solo album, disc number 11 shows no sign of the wear and tear that being a professional musician for nearly your entire working life can take on even the sturdiest human. Sure, there was a 12 year solo layoff between 1976 and ’98; but that time was filled as a member of both Sea Level and Steve Winwood’s backing ensemble, the latter gig lasting 16 years.

Lee Bains III + The Glory Fires deliver a verbose musical assault flush with punk insurgence and righteous indignation. With the exception of only a small handful of songs (out of 17 overall), Youth Identification surges like a veritable call to arms; a driving, deliberative battle cry that rails against the decay of cultural institutions, racial disparity, the marginalization of minorities and the upheaval of tradition, tolerance and common core beliefs.

Many bands never get off the ground because they can’t find their “home.” Banditos, as confirmed by their second album Visionland, have no such concerns. For them, home is ‘70s Muscle Shoals country-soul colliding with psychedelia and occult, and stamped by the identifiable quaver of singer Mary Beth Richardson. Banditos’ bread and butter is four-to-the-floor bass and drums,

“Am I the last of my kind?” Jason Isbell ponders on his new album, The Nashville Sound. Isbell, who hails from the Muscle Shoals region of Northwest Alabama, is singing, as he often does, in character, this time a down-and-out survivor struggling to play catch up with the rapidly changing country he calls home.

So this is what happens when a group of old jazz hands get into a Levon Helm kind of way. Hudson is the name of an album, a supergroup and a song on the album by the supergroup. The combination of Jack DeJohnette, John Scofield, John Medeski and Larry Grenadier is capable of so much; Hudson delivers in that it doesn’t kowtow to expectations of what kind of music these four legends should make.

With their swampy riffs and mud-covered rock n’ roll, the North Mississippi Allstars have always honored the past while keeping an eye on the future. That tradition continues with their forthcoming album, Prayer For Peace, a collection of Allstars originals as well as reinterpretations of works by legendary artists that have influenced the band. Anchored by core members and industry vets Luther and Cody Dickinson, the Allstars have earned a well-deserved reputation as blues masters.

Forming a trilogy with 2014’s Single Mothers and 2015’s Absent Fathers, J.T. Earle’s latest teams him with Omaha indie-rock don Mike Mogis (Bright Eyes) for his rangiest set yet. “What’s She Crying For” is a moaning honky-tonk weeper with pedal steel and roadhouse piano, “What’s Goin’ Wrong” is clarinet-spiked Texas swing impressionism, “15-25” is vintage New Orleans R&B gumbo in the Professor Longhair