Tag Archives: music

How the pedal steel guitar stole my heart

The pedal steel guitar has long been one of my favorite instruments. There’s just something about its sound that can go from quicksilver pure to rough and distorted in the blink of an eye that captured my heart at some … Continue reading

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Medicine Singers’ Medicine Singers

The Medicine Singers’ self-titled debut release is yet another mind-blowing musical project out of Indian Country. This year of 2022 seems to be the year for them! Although this one includes some guest vocals from Joe Rainey, a Red Lake … Continue reading

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SUSS’s Heat Haze

Heat Haze picks up where the New York ambient country band SUSS left off with their previous offering, Night Suite left off. That five-song EP, you’ll recall, dropped unexpectedly in October 2021. It took the listener on a nighttime journey … Continue reading

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Evan J Cartwright’s bit by bit

Evan J Cartwright is a Toronto-based musical polymath who is best known as the go-to drummer and collaborator for a variety of top-notch indie acts, the best known of them being The Weather Station. For his first full-length release under … Continue reading

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Club d’Elf’s You Never Know

So I guess now I’m a fan of dub? Or at least of some of its hybrids in world music, like the Turkish psychedelic dub of Baba Zula, the American Southwestern dub experiments of Calexico, and now this world-dub-jazz hybrid … Continue reading

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Laurel Premo’s Golden Loam

Solo guitar albums can be daunting to listen to and even moreso to review. Especially if you’re not a guitar player yourself and don’t have the knowledge to pick out what’s unique about the guitarist’s style, or the vocabulary to … Continue reading

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Ben Yagoda’s The B-Side: The Death of Tin Pan Alley and the Rebirth of the Great American Song

“They don’t write songs like that anymore!” You’ve probably said that about some song from your own youth or young adult years, just as your parents and maybe even grandparents said about their old favorites. Every generation says this about … Continue reading

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Almog Sharvit’s Get Up or Cry

Musicians are not always the most articulate persons when it comes to describing their own music. It looks to me like bassist Almog Sharvit is the exception. Because when he refers to the music on his debut leader date Get … Continue reading

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Ryan Dugré’s Three Rivers

Brooklyn guitarist Ryan Dugré did an exercise in which he wrote a song a day in January 2019, as a way to move himself out of his usual songwriting comfort zone. The idea was to just get something down, an … Continue reading

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Frode Haltli Avant Folk’s St. Morten

Everything new is old again for the holiday season of 2020. Everyone in the English speaking world knows the song “The Twelve Days Of Christmas,” right? Well, Norwegian accordionist Frode Haltli and his Avant Folk ensemble have a treat for … Continue reading

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