Tag Archives: Americana music

Richard D. Smith’s Bluegrass: An Informal Guide 

Brendan Foreman penned this review. Bluegrass music really lives a strange existence within the world of American music. Its form is too stylized and polished to classify it properly as a “folk music.” After all, the big bluegrass events of the … Continue reading

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Boiled in Lead’s Silver 

Before commenting on Boiled in Lead’s Silver, CD, let me stress one point: “punk” is a general descriptive term denoting, most often, a subgenre. Thus we have celtopunk, Christian punk, glam punk, and any number of other punks in music. In … Continue reading

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Boiled in Lead’s Alloy 

Gut reaction: keeper. Alloy is the “Greatest Hits” collection of Boiled in Lead,a collection of tracks mostly culled from previous albums leavenedwith a few previously unreleased tunes and new versions. This isquite a ride, since Boiled in Lead has evolved through … Continue reading

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Boiled in Lead’s The First Decade of Recordings

Chuck Lipsig penned this review. The problem when writing about Boiled in Lead is how to describe them. Rock and roll? Punk? Blues? Jazz? Traditional? Which tradition? They’ve done everything from Irish to Albanian to Vietnamese to American Traditional. Indeed, there … Continue reading

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Mikko Joensuu’s Amen 1

Mikko Joensuu is a Finnish musician, singer and songwriter who’s known in his home country for his work in an indie-psychedelic-shoegaze band called Joensuu 1685. His solo debut Amen 1 is the first release in a planned trilogy of Americana-tinged … Continue reading

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Western Centuries’ Weight of the World

Western Centuries makes country & western music the way it oughta be made. Pedal steel, driving rhythms, twangy guitars, songs about loving and losing and drinking celebrating the good things in life. This group is the current vehicle for Cahalen … Continue reading

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Rosanne Cash at the Monteith Riverpark

As free concerts-in-the-park go, Rosanne Cash’s appearance on the third weekly installment of the 2003 River Rhythms concert series started out as about normal. It was a fairly large crowd, estimated at about 8,000, and moderately attentive. Albany is the … Continue reading

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Childsplay at the State Street Church

Imagine anywhere from 21 to 28 fiddler/violin players on one stage with a rhythm section, throw in a random banjo or wooden flute … sound like a party? Well, that’s how Childsplay got its start: in Bob Childs’ house at … Continue reading

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Eric Brace & Peter Cooper’s C&O Canal

How can you go wrong with an album of country music that includes songs by the likes of Emmylou Harris, Mary Chapin Carpenter, John Starling, and Alice Gerrard, among others? Well, you’d have to try really hard to blow it, … Continue reading

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Sound Bites: Four new singer-songwriter CDs

Singer-songwriters in the Americana field are as plentiful as mushrooms in the spring. I  certainly can’t review all of the releases that land on my desk, but here are some recent releases that, to me, rise above the rest of … Continue reading

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