Demob Happy

Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle - Bill Callahan
8.5/10

Just as I thought I was tiring of the alt-country/new folk revival, along comes an album - from one of the scene’s relative old timers - of such immersive beauty that I can’t get enough of it. While there is much about Bill Callahan’s ‘Sometimes I [...]

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Family matters
FIRST PUBLISHED AT ALTSOUNDS.COM
7.5/10
The Handsome Family’s (aka Brett & Rennie Sparks) eighth album ‘Honey Moon’ is a collection of love songs “featuring tales of intimate insects and lovers kissing in wet caves”, released to mark their 20th wedding anniversary. Maintaining the gothic Americana Family template of previous albums, ‘Honey Moon’ blends the baroque with [...]

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Mr Blue Sky !
8/10
My ongoing love affair with Wilco began at the time of Sky Blue Sky’s release, but not, oddly, with the album itself, which received fairly mixed opinions at the time. Sifting through those variable reviews I found myself tracking back to their earlier album ‘Yankee Hotel Foxtrot‘, for me their masterpiece, and [...]

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Blood on the log-cabin floor
7/10
Vocoders: yes or no? The use of such synthesized vocals took a big dip in fashion between its Kraftwerk and ELO heyday and its minor resurgence under the auspices of so-called Chill Out acts such as Air and Bent. However, it is a sound probably most commonly associated these days with [...]

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Enter planet dust
8.5/10
‘Carried to Dust‘ is Calexico’s most mature work to date, arguably the best synthesis of their frontier atmospherics and Latin-inflected country songwriting. The follow-up to 2005’s much-dismissed ‘Garden Ruin’, ‘Carried to Dust’ makes the ‘South-Western noir’ tag stick better than any other Calexico album. It’s a record of great dusky beauty, varied and [...]

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My new My Morning Jacket?

7/10
I have been sitting on this review for a couple of months now, at a loss on what to say or how to start. Honestly I think that might be because I don’t like this album as much as I wanted to, that it hasn’t stirred the same inspiration in me [...]

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The Empire strikes black
8.5/10
Micah P Hinson’s fourth album - the first I’ve heard since his powerful debut ‘Micah P Hinson and the Gospel of Progress‘ - is an accomplished work and the sound of a prolific artist heading for an artistic peak. Produced by alt-rock mixing guru John Congleton, renowned for the dark gloss put [...]

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Wildly overrated
4/10
‘Into the Wild‘ is an apaptation of Jon Krakauer’s bestselling true story about Christopher McCandless, a middle-class graduate who dropped out and hit the road in search of “ultimate freedom” in Alaska. Sean Penn’s treatment of the story is an embarassingly self-righteous and romanticised interpretation that says much more about the [...]

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Dawn choruses
8.5/10
The first thing you notice when listening to ‘At Dawn‘ if, like me, you’ve approached their back catalogue, er, backwards, is how faithful it is to a kind of alt-country orthodoxy when compared to the more magpie-like tendencies of ‘It Still Moves‘ and ‘Z‘. Arguably it is more a consistency of mood [...]

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Too long but It Still Moves me
8.5/10
The Louisville, Kentucky band’s third full-length is a whopping 75-minute set recorded in a grain silo and positively swimming in reverb. By eschewing modern recording techniques altogether they were taking a big risk on ‘It Still Moves‘, their first for a major label, but is with the swagger [...]

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