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

On Heaven and Earth, Washington continues to explore a sweet spot between artistry and approachability. Whether his success will lead audiences to further explore music that usually exists on the fringes is an interesting question. What is more certain is the quality and accessibility of his own music. Heaven and Earth feels writhingly alive and passionate, angrily of the moment but inclusive.

Former R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck and often-experimental singer-songwriter Joseph Arthur have teamed up for an album that was written mostly in a few days after a chance encounter in Mexico and recorded nearly as quickly. Fresh and spontaneous, it’s also filled with precious sonic details, like little flashes sparking the songs. Unsurprisingly, Buck’s layers of acoustic guitars and bright and brief solos provide numerous R.E.M. textures

This late into the age of confessional songwriting, when even the most bubblegum of artists trouble the Top 40 with TMI, it’s rare to find an album that can startle you with its cat-out-of-the-bag bluntness.

When Neko Case’s house burned down in 2017, her local newspaper invaded her privacy to a degree that made her fear the return of the stalker she had recently bankrupted herself to defeat. The journalist publicized her furious, private response, which told her something about how women’s life stories are stolen from them, how quickly their anger is spun as hysteria.

There’s a tension in Joshua Redman’s new album, Still Dreaming, and it may not be the one that you expect. For the last couple of years, Redman, a saxophonist within jazz’s first tier of prominence, has led an agile post-bop group with Ron Miles on cornet, Scott Colley on bass and Brian Blade on drums.

Now a bona fide indie-rock heroine, Barnett has made a second LP that occasionally recalls her early come-to-Yeezus session. Tell Me How You Really Feel is noisy and way more pissed off than her 2015 debut, Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit, unsheathing sharp new earnestness alongside her trademark sabers of sarcasm and penetrating observation.

Alex Turner has taken his muse off into space – the moon, specifically. It’s an awe-inspiring place, somewhat despoiled by humans and their need to build hotel-cum-casinos near the Sea of Tranquility. If you’ve been to Niagara Falls, you’ll have a flavour. There’s a taqueria on the roof, too, scoring four stars out of five (“and that’s unheard-of”, vamps Turner).

How do you stare down the fact that your days are numbered? That’s the question hovering over the latest album from country legend Willie Nelson. The soon-to-be 85-year-old has watched all the artists that inspired him and nearly all those who were part of his outlaw posse make their final transitions. Sad, yes, but a dull inevitability. Rather than lament his fate, Nelson is facing it with the same humor,

From the opening licks of “Bad Habit” to the closing notes of “Family Tree,” you can feel the energy pulsing through the new Black Stone Cherry album. “Bad Habit” may be one of the best tracks exemplifying their fully fleshed out swagger.

Let us all rejoice, the might John Prine, master of understatement, walks among us again! A new album from John Prine is always reason to celebrate, but an album in which he wrote or co-wrote all the songs is an even bigger reason to rejoice. The Tree of Forgiveness is the first album since 2005’s Fair & Square where Prine has written the songs.