Demob Happy

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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FIRST PUBLISHED AT THE LINE OF BEST FIT
Keep this in mind for your Christmas stockings …
8/10
When it was released earlier this year I resisted ‘Sunday At Devil Dirt’, Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan’s well-received, rather tongue-in-cheek take on Americana, their second full-length collaboration. It seemed to me too studied, too contrived somehow, a feeling heightened [...]

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Micah Blues and Red Rivers
7/10
Micah Blue Smaldone is a former punk scenester from New England who has moved on to sparse, rootsy folk. ‘The Red River‘, his fourth solo record, is dominated by meditative, neo-traditional acoustica with an eye for theatre. While intimate in scale it much less personal than, say, Bon Iver, but more [...]

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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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Kentucky fried pysch-country
8.5/10
Over four albums My Morning Jacket have fashioned a sound that embraces widescreen emotionalism with rootsy Americana, pyschedelia and alt-country. ‘Z‘ sees My Morning Jacket broaden their influences while retaining the unifying use of reverb that makes all the songs sound unmistakably them now matter how far they stray from the [...]

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Feast of fun
9/10
Calexico’s sound inhabits the frontier badlands of the American Southwest, a cinematic multi-instumental brew that takes in jazz, alt-country, Mariachi, folk and electronics. It’s a widescreen affair, a mixture of traditional rootsy Americana (’Quattro’) and brooding instrumental mood pieces (’Pepita’, ‘Across The Wire’) that evoke rust and dust choked border towns. Dubbed ‘desert-rock’ [...]

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Exciting debut!
8/10
Micah P Hinson & The Gospel of Progress… is an assured debut from a young man the publicists would like you to believe has had a tough life. It certainly sounds like it. With a gravely, smoke-chiselled voice that recalls Nick Cave and early Leonard Cohen, Hinson sings largely of loss over desolate [...]

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