Archive for the What We’re Into – Recent Interest Category

The Mastersons are singer-songwriters/multi-instrumentalists Chris Masterson and Eleanor Whitmore. Longtime members of Steve Earle’s band the Dukes, the musical and marital twosome make inspired albums of their own vivid, deeply humanistic songs.

On RESIST!, Chicago’s original punk cowboys, The Waco Brothers, play protest songs about the folks getting shoved down, and songs about the system that’s doing the shoving. The band’s 25-year songbook remains alarmingly relevant.

Industrial noise rages over pummelling bass, a leaden drum pattern thuds, her breathy vocals keep threatening to sound euphoric – beginning to spiral upwards as the song reaches its chorus before pulling back to somewhere darker and more discomfiting.

Tame Impala, AKA 34-year-old Australian Kevin Parker, started out in 2010 as a home-recording, guitar-wielding psychedelic rocker but 2015’s Currents cemented his metamorphosis into an arena-filling synth-psych act whose tunes are covered by Rihanna and Arctic Monkeys.

Ultimately, it is a pleasure to hear Scott-Heron’s voice – whether in scratchy falsetto or in soliloquising baritone – and McCraven’s rearranging, often minimizing instrumentation, pays beautiful homage to it.

This eighth Wood Brothers studio album may be the most fully integrated record in their discography, certainly as much so as the first releases with the sibling as a duo. That sound of Oliver and Chris singing together in close harmony

Bill Fay’s albums for Deram Records made in 1970 and 1971 and deleted shortly afterwards – got new life after endorsements from the likes of Jim O’Rourke (Tortoise) and Jeff Tweedy (Wilco) led to a huge revival of interest in this vanished artist.