Recent Music Purchases
2025 November
AJJ’s newest album, Disposable Everything, bends beneath the weight of everything around the planet being fucked beyond repair. The gerbil in the microwave has exploded into a cataclysmic shift aiming to split the United States in half! After the mess of 2016 and its sequel four years later, the leading voices in folk-punk—five storytellers who sought to break down the systems of hedonistic masculinity that fueled disasters, wars, racism and douchery—were forced to reconfigure just how much space they should, or could, give to their versions of villains inflicting real, generational trauma on marginalized people in their songs.
The difference a decade can make is colossal: Not even a score ago, AJJ made music as Andrew Jackson Jihad and sang lyrics like this: “But there’s a bad man in everyone / No matter who we are / There’s a rapist and a Nazi living in our tiny hearts / Child pornographers and cannibals, and politicians, too / There’s someone in your head waiting to fucking strangle you.” When I came across the Phoenix quintet’s (Sean Bonnette, Ben Gallaty, Preston Bryant, Mark Glick and Kevin Higuchi) music on a random Pandora station a dozen years ago, it didn’t feel edgy so much as a lesson I didn’t quite have the capacity to understand yet. I didn’t know that the lines Bonnette sang were not endorsements but, rather, fast critiques and satirization of the bad brutes employing inequity, poverty, homophobia and misogyny on the world around us.
A song like “People II: The Reckoning” is painfully relevant now, and I remember a time when dudes would go to AJJ shows and be too vicious in the pits—merciless to their fellow men (but mostly women) to the point where the band would call them out for their behavior, as those menaces in the audience were flirting with the scumbag mentalities that they’d bought tickets to hear frontman Bonnette and company sing about. AJJ’s sophomore album People Who Can Eat People Are the Luckiest People in the World, now almost 16 years old, was a mixture of bullying deadbeats through high-brow, gutter-rat poetics and genuine, empathetic extensions of love to the people often under the boot of loudmouths who reveal their true colors and aggressions once the loud, in-your-face music starts.
Back then, we all found joy in singing “there’s a bad man in everyone” loud and proud, regardless of if we were clear-eyed teenagers, foul-mouthed pricks or stuck in the purgatory of grayness somewhere in-between. To be evil, figuratively or literally, felt like a fate that couldn’t be so bad, especially if it meant getting immortalized in the brash sing-song of AJJ and other folk-punk troubadours forever. In retrospect, I—and my raucous comrades—probably should have sung “People are people regardless of skin / People are people regardless of creed / People are people regardless of gender / People are people regardless of anything” louder.
2025 October
Tony has also recorded four solo albums featuring new songs, covers, and guest appearances by many of Nashville’s finest musicians as well as folks who have recorded his songs, including Garth, Patty, and Lee Roy.
Tony Arata was born in Savannah, GA and grew up on nearby Tybee Island.
While studying for a journalism degree from Georgia Southern University, he began performing his original songs in local bands. In 1986, he and his wife Jaymi moved to Nashville where his unique, soulful style began to get the attention of people like Allen Reynolds and Garth Brooks. Garth, to date, has recorded seven of Tony’s songs, and “The Dance” won song of the year at The Academy of Country Music and received both a Country Music Association and a Grammy nomination, as well as a most performed song in Radio and Records Magazine.
Tony is a member of the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame (2012). He has also had No. 1 records with “Here I Am” for Patty Loveless, “I’m Holding My Own” for Lee Roy Parnell, and “Dreaming With My Eyes Open” for Clay Walker. Other artists who have recorded his songs include Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, Bonnie Raitt, Trisha Yearwood, Delbert McClinton, Don Williams, Reba McEntire, Suzy Bogguss, and Hal Ketchum.
2025 September
https://rodneycrowell.bandcamp.com/album/airline-highway
Full of deep empathy, sober insights, and lively guitar licks, Rodney Crowell’s new album takes its title from a seemingly mundane stretch of four-lane blacktop that runs deep into Louisiana. It’s the road he and producer Tyler Bryant drove to reach the remote studio where they recorded these songs, hauling a truckload of gear on a two-day journey that ended in swamps. Along the way Crowell looked up the route they were driving: Airline Highway. It’s the southernmost segment of Highway 61, also called the Blues Highway or the Great River Road, and it follows the Mississippi River from Minnesota down to New Orleans. Crowell is intimately familiar with this part of the country. He grew up on the east side of Houston, just a few hours west of the state line, and made wild forays into Louisiana as a young man to drink or carouse or mostly to catch live music.
Airline Highway is an album full of old, abiding loves, whether it’s a favorite song or a lover you remember fondly. Songs like “Sometime Thang” and “Rainy Days in California” (the latter featuring Lukas Nelson) raise a glass to old romances and encounters with different women in California or down in Louisiana: falling in love, toughing out hard times, growing apart until they become “that small voice on your phone,” to quote a devastating line on “Taking Flight,” co-written with and featuring Ashley McBryde. Some are fictional, Crowell explains, but they all contain some kernel of truth.
“At a basic level there are a lot more years behind me than there are ahead of me. I’m up in my seventieth decade of my life, and I’m glad that I’m still looking forward to certain things I want to do, but a lot of what’s worth talking about is behind me.” One of the things Crowell looks forward to is making more music with musicians he genuinely loves. “I’m just in love with the experience now. I’ve worked with amazing people in the past, but I was looking too far ahead. I wanted the music we were creating to make a name for me, so I wasn’t completely present with them. My ego was involved. But now my ego seems to have finally evaporated. Now it’s just about the work and what a blessing it is to be able to do it. The work truly feeds me in the moment.”
https://savingcountrymusic.com/album-review-margo-prices-hard-headed-woman/
Oh, Miss Margo Price: the jilted high school cheerleader captain of country music. She had us all singing her praises when she released her debut album Midwest Farmer’s Daughter in 2016. But after some serious overhyping, and her propensity to tell people to shove it on Twitter under the veil of “activism,” she became a super polarizing character, eventually fluttering away from country music to some version of pop in the vein of Kacey, Maren, Taylor, and so many other country women.
But now Margo’s back, reunited with original producer Matt Ross-Spang, and just released perhaps the best album since her debut, maybe the best album of her entire career, and maybe one of the best country albums so far this year—and in a year of kick ass country albums from kick ass country women. If a guy that Margo once said was an “uneducated, misogynistic, racist, homophobic bully” can give this thing an honest listen and come to this conclusion (don’t worry, she got ratio’d by her own fans), so can you. This really is a killer record.
It’s been said before, but making great country music really isn’t that complicated ladies and gentlemen. Pick up a pen and paper and spill your guts, get some hot shit pickers in the studio, find some good variety in mood and tempo, and don’t try to be too cute about it. Along with some quality songs, Hard Headed Woman is just a great listening record, fun and infectious at times, deeply sentimental in others, and strongly country to go along with ample variety to keep the listening experience interesting.
Margo Price says what inspired her to get back to her country roots was shaking up her touring band. Sturgill Simpson might be partly to blame for that after he stole bass player Kevin Black back. Ironically, Simpson did his own stint in the Price Tags before his career exploded. But really the story of Hard Headed Woman feels like Margo going back in time to before her two kids with fellow performer Jeremy Ivey, and singing songs about when she was young, heartbroken, and hungry.
Tough times are where the best country songs come from. Margo Price sings about a lot of tough times on this record. “Close To You” and “Keep a Picture” capture the authentic emotions of a pining heart, and are graced by strong storytelling. “Nowhere is Where” is a sad exploration of Midwest despondency that Price can sing about with authority. These songs are also complimented by interesting textures, however understated, like the fiddle in “Nowhere.” Price has always struggled to capture the best of herself in studio. Hard Headed Woman breaks that streak.
Price does reprise her tradition of having duet partners sing in uncomfortable keys when Tyler Childers joins her on “Love Me Like You Used To Do.” But man is the song a country heartbreaker that ultimately sets right in your ears. And even though there’s a lot of sad songs here, the album doesn’t listen through like a downer overall. “Losing Streak” is about living out of your car and in the same clothes for a couple of weeks, but Price makes this upbeat country rock anthem feel downright inspirational by the end, constituting one of the record’s best tracks.
And if you want hot shit country songs, you got them with “Don’t Let The Bastards Get You Down” co-written with Kris Kristofferson and Rodney Crowell, the super fun “Red Eye Flight,” and the perfect album ender in “Kissing You Goodbye.” There are a lot of influences evidenced on Hard Headed Woman, but the prevailing one is country with an Outlaw kick.
The title of this album can be employed both as a euphemism and as a term of endearment. There’s nothing inherently wrong with being principled or even political if a performer feels it’s necessary. But there is a point when an artist’s prickly nature fails to serve their own interests, or even fails to serve the political causes they support. At times in her career, Margo Price has found that breaking point, while also losing sight of what makes her special as a musician and artist. By recognizing her own hard-headedness, she can utilize it as a strength, but not allow it to be a burden or a weakness.
What’s great about a great album is that it solves a lot of problems, puts things into perspective, papers over petty grievances, and puts the emphasis where it should be first and foremost: the music. That’s the kind of retrenching, revitalizing, entertaining, and important album Margo Price has released with Hard Headed Woman, at least in the estimate of this “uneducated, misogynistic, racist, homophobic bully.”
https://jonlangfordthebrightshiners.bandcamp.com/album/where-it-really-starts
Jon Langford’s been in more bands than you have digits – and that’s true even if you were born with a few extras! From his early days in Mekons, Delta 5, Three Johns and even Sisters Of Mercy (booted for not wearing black) to a veritable explosion of one-off recordings and performances with more names than we could ever hope to list in full. A Wikipedia description for this group, The Bright Shiners (described therein as ‘circa 2022 through at least 2023, in Northern California’) provides some sense of the complex taxonomy needed just to keep track of Jon’s massive oeuvre.
Happily, that’s an understated description of a serious new outlet for his endless creativity, and The Bright Shiners’ recording activities have produced a full album, Where It Really Starts, the first recording in a collaboration with Tamineh Gueramy, Alice Spencer, and Jon’s frequent musical partner, John Szymanski.
Jon’s never sung or written better, and the sense that the band realised they were onto something great is palpable in an instant. Each song is a minimalistic jewel – there’s nothing here that doesn’t need to be – yet the album is unsparing of aptly astonishing adornment – wonderful harmonies, horns, mellotron, bowed guitar, piano. looped percussion and more), by our reckoning this is one of Jon’s finest works of art and his best outfit outside The Mekons themselves.
2025 August
https://www.nonesuch.com/journal/molly-tuttle-new-album-so-long-little-miss-sunshine-due-august-15-nonesuch-2025-06-03
Molly Tuttle, following back-to-back Grammy-winning albums with her band Golden Highway, along with a Best New Artist nomination, releases her new solo album, So Long Little Miss Sunshine, August 15, 2025, on Nonesuch Records; you can pre-order the album here. Recorded in Nashville with producer Jay Joyce (Orville Peck, Miranda Lambert, Lainey Wilson), the fifth full album from the singer, songwriter, and virtuoso guitarist marks a sonic departure from her recent work and features twelve new songs—eleven originals and one cover, of Icona Pop and Charli xcx’s “I Love It.” The album’s first single, “That’s Gonna Leave a Mark,” which she co-wrote with Kevin Griffin (Better Than Ezra), is also out today.
After a summer of festival sets and headline shows, Tuttle and her new live band lead The Highway Knows tour, starting at Thalia Hall in Chicago on September 10, with shows in Brooklyn Steel in New York and The Fonda in Los Angeles, among many others, culminating at The Fillmore in San Francisco on December 13. Tickets for newly announced dates are on-sale Friday, June 6; all shows are listed below.
Tuttle says, “I’ve been wanting to make this record for such a long time. Part of me was scared to do such a big departure, and that went into the album title.” Eventually she decided, “‘You know what? I’m just not going to care what people think. I’m going to do what I want.’”
She continues, “I wrote ‘That’s Gonna Leave a Mark’ with my friend Kevin Griffin. He has such a brilliant pop sensibility. We reworked it a little bit last year. It’s fun, sort of sassy, and that guitar part is one of my favorites that I play on the record.”
Tuttle’s career has charted a course between honoring bluegrass and stretching its boundaries. One of the most decorated female guitarist alive, she was the first woman to win the prestigious International Bluegrass Music Award’s Guitar Player of the Year in 2017, at age twenty-four, and won again the following year, with nominations nearly every year since; she has also won Americana Music Association’s Instrumentalist of the Year award.
On her new album—a hybrid of pop, country, rock, and flat-picking, plus one murder ballad—Tuttle goes to a whole new place. Her virtuoso guitar work takes center stage on this album more than ever, and for the first time, she introduces her banjo playing into two of her recordings.“I like to be a bit of a chameleon with my music. Keep people guessing and keep it full of surprises,” she says.
So Long Little Miss Sunshine was recorded with drummer/percussionists Jay Bellerose and Fred Eltringham, bassist Byron House, and Joyce on multiple instruments. Ketch Secor (Old Crow Medicine Show) also plays banjo, fiddle, and harmonica, as well as singing harmony; much of the LP was co-written with Secor, who is also Tuttle’s partner. “We spend so much time together, we live together, and anytime I have a song idea, or he has one, it’s just so easy to transition from whatever we’re doing into writing a song.”
Tuttle also conceived the artwork for So Long Little Miss Sunshine, which features multiple Mollys, each wearing a different wig except for one with nothing on her head at all. Tuttle has been bald since she was three years old due to the autoimmune condition alopecia areata; she acts as a spokesperson for the National Alopecia Areata Foundation.
https://thewoodbrothers.bandcamp.com/album/puff-of-smoke
Listening, in its truest sense, is a dying art, but it’s one The Wood Brothers are committed to practicing and upholding as a virtue. In fact, it’s the secret to the mélange of joyful sounds and musical styles on Puff of Smoke, the American roots trio’s ninth album of original music. Indeed, through the near two decades spent together in the studio and on the road, the Grammy Award-nominated trio have honed their interconnected, singular voice to telepathic proportions. On this latest studio effort, a true collaborative effort between its three members, the songs weave a medley of musical ideas — ranging from Latin-inflected acoustic guitar lines, to driving post-jazz rhythms, to infectious sing along choruses — resulting in a cohesive, joyful whole. All with The Wood Brothers’ trademark turns of phrase and lighthearted, but subversively profound wisdom at the core. Puff of Smoke is a reminder that life is both precious and precarious, and The Wood Brothers invite you to enjoy the ride.
https://jamesmcmurtry.bandcamp.com/album/the-black-dog-and-the-wandering-boy
When his father died in 2021, James McMurtry went through his effects and discovered a rough pencil sketch of himself as a child. “I knew it was of me, but I didn’t realize who drew it. I had to ask my stepmom, and she said it looked like Ken Kesey’s work back in the ‘60s.” The Merry Pranksters—Kesey’s roving band of hippie activists and creators—stopped by often to visit Larry McMurtry, his wife Faye, and his very young son James.
He held on to that drawing as he worked on a new album, The Black Dog and the Wandering Boy, his eleventh. It’s a collection of rough-hewn story-songs and richly drawn character sketches that have elements of Americana—rolling guitars, barroom harmonies, traces of banjo and harmonica—but sound too sly and smart for such a generalized category. Funny and sad often in the same breath, it adds a new chapter to a long career that has enjoyed a recent resurgence as younger songwriters like Sarah Jarosz (who plays on the new album) and Jason Isbell (who took McMurtry on tour) cite him as a formative influence.
McMurtry’s characters face similar realizations, although theirs are harder, sadder, and arrive at the end of life rather than the beginning. Sometimes they find life savers, like a calling or a fond memory; sometimes they drown, like that South Texas lawman. Even the songwriter himself doesn’t always know what will happen or what will inspire him. “You follow the words where they lead. If you can get a character, maybe you can get a story. If you can set it to a verse-chorus structure, maybe you can get a song.”
https://medium.com/culture-beat/robs-album-of-the-week-murder-by-death-s-egg-dart-eb0d11812517
For the past 25 years, Murder By Death have stood apart from their contemporaries due to possessing a gothic-tinged blend of folk, country, blues and alt-rock that was forged during a time where emo and pop punk were some of the leading musical trends. They’ve always created music on their own terms, so it’s fitting that they’re possibly going out in the same fashion. This is evident with their announcement of a farewell tour earlier this year. Along with this news, there’s also the release of a stellar full-length album. It’s called Egg & Dart, it was self-released by the band on June 13, and it’s an excellent way to conclude a fantastic discography.
The title for the full-length is an apt one due to it coming from a symbol of life and death, kind of like the beginning and end of a creative endeavor. In a musical sense, the songs are melancholy while reflecting on various things like relationships and hope for the future in the midst of uncertainty. The production is pristine with Adam Turla’s depth-filled vocals and guitar having a major presence along with Sarah Balliet on cello, Dagan Thogerson on drums and percussion, Emma Tiemann on violin, Tyler Morse on bass and David Fountain on a variety of instruments. While knowing that this could be the final record from Murder By Death, the songs have more of an importance. With this being said, this is a top-notch effort to go out swinging rather than with a dud.
I first got into Murder By Death through a friend of mine in college during the 2000s, and I liked how different they sounded from a lot of other things I was hearing at the time. As a person who got into the blues at a young age, I appreciated those slight elements along with the intertwining of folk, country and alternative. I eventually became a big fan, especially after seeing them live at the old Jerky’s in Providence during the early 2010s. I genuinely hope it isn’t the last we hear from this band, but if it’s the case, then thanks so much for the music. Speaking of music, here are my top tracks off of the Album of The Week:
That hopeful outlook I previously mentioned is echoed in “Believe” with the acoustic guitar chords and the vocal harmonies making it shine. “Lose You” has synth elements that give off pop sensibilities with the cello taking the lead on the instrumentation. It’s definitely the outlier within the album, but it also freshens up the sequencing. There’s a haunting characteristic within “Black Velvet Cloak” that I really enjoy. This is conveyed through Turla’s lyrics, the harmonies, structures and arrangements and it’s a fantastic closing tune.
As part Murder By Death’s farewell tour, their next show is going to be at the Southgate House Revival in Newport, Kentucky on June 19. Other notable dates include June 23 at the Bearsville Theater in Woodstock, New York, June 27 at the Paradise Rock Club in Boston, June 1 & 2 at the Grog Shop in Cleveland, July 12 at Union Transfer in Philadelphia and July 19 at First Avenue in Minneapolis. This is your last chance for the time being to see an incredible band live, so make sure to go see them at your friendly neighborhood music venue. For now, grab a copy of Egg & Dart and give it a listen. It’s a heck of a way to go out from one of the best musical acts so far this century.
https://nodepression.org/album-review-patterson-hood-exploding-trees-airplane-screams/
It may have taken Patterson Hood a dozen years to get it out, but Exploding Trees & Airplane Screams was well worth the wait. The Drive-By Truckers co-founder is no stranger to making solo records—this is his fourth—but none are quite like this one. Crafted with help from the very artists for whom Hood has been an essential influence, and with a deep focus on new sonic territory and his own coming of age story, Exploding Trees & Airplane Screams manages to feel entirely fresh, no small feat considering the lifespan of some of its songs from an artist decades into a prolific career.
In the 12 years since his last solo record, Hood has remained busy with the Truckers, sidelining material of his own that never quite fit the band’s mold. Still, that desire to stretch himself never left him and this record finds him fully expanding in sound and vision. From the first few notes of keys and synth on opening track “Exploding Trees” — a recounting of the memory of a powerful storm’s impact — a dark hope seeps out that never lets up until album’s end.
Hood seems to be beckoning his listeners to buckle up for a passage through time and space with the song’s otherworldly textures and his almost meditative vocals. Fellow Alabama native Katie Crutchfield (Waxahatchee) drops in for the lovingly-weathered duet “The Forks of Cypress,” a ghost story that perfectly melds their voices set to the dreamiest, sloping guitar licks from Kevin Morby. Frequent Truckers road mate Lydia Loveless joins “A Werewolf and a Girl,” lending her crystalline vocals to a past lover’s perspective in an ink-black correspondence accompanied by foreboding horns. Wednesday brings their alt-rock youthful vigor to the nostalgia pop rocker “The Van Pelt Parties,” and eerie strings saturate “Airplane Screams,” one of the eldest songs in the bunch, finally perfected into a sonic orchestral boom for this outing.
Hood is walking proof that with age comes no less imagination and with time, memories become mythic. Exploding Trees & Airplane Screams is a powerhouse set from an artist who doesn’t conflate self-assuredness with complacency. It’s all thrills from beginning to end as Hood mines the lore of himself and toes the line between fantasy and reality, an ambitious challenge to which he rises, eagerly.
2025 May
Always Been is the sixth solo album from Craig Finn, arriving April 4, 2025. The album was produced by Finn’s long time friend Adam Granduciel, the principal of The War on Drugs. Always Been is direct both in both music and title. As Finn says, “I’ve always been Craig Finn.”
From the opener “Bethany”, a moody piano-driven portrait with a distinctive Granduciel guitar solo, to the propulsion of the first single “People of Substance”, to the vivid storytelling and character development that has marked Finn’s career, this record feels at once familiar and fresh.
Recorded throughout 2024 at One Cue Studio in Burbank, CA, Always Been features a host of musicians, including many of Granduciel’s bandmates in The War on Drugs. Kathleen Edwards and Sam Fender provide guest vocals. The musical result is distinctive, purposeful, and commanding.
This is perhaps Finn’s most narrative record yet. It tells the story of a man who becomes a clergyman despite a lack of faith. The songs detail his rise, fall, and eventual redemption, while also shining a light to sharply reveal the other characters that populate the world he moves through.
Always Been is Finn’s 6th solo record, standing alongside his nine albums with The Hold Steady. With his last solo release, A Legacy of Rentals, receiving year end accolades from Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, Aquarium Drunkard and more, Always Been arrives as an exciting next step for this prolific storyteller and songwriter.
I am happy to present to you an album of “Capps-Core” music called LIFE IS STRANGE. I recorded it a few years ago with some friends in Dripping Springs. It is my most personal album to date and is streaming everywhere NOW. I’ve gotten tired of worrying about promotion and internet stuff and figured it would be cool to just release something and not mess with all the other crap. Whoever needs to hear it will hear it!
There are tapes and CDs too. You can get ‘em on my bandcamp page or at the upcoming solo shows I’m playing in Tejas this week. Stay real my foos.
- GTC
Jeff Tweedy’s deluxe edition of his acclaimed 2020 solo album Love Is The King will be released digitally and as a two-disc CD package on December 10, 2021. A vinyl release will follow in 2022. Titled Love Is The King / Live Is The King this expanded package features the original album plus a bonus disc with live versions of all eleven songs played by Jeff with a full band. The live versions were recorded at The Loft (Wilco’s studio) and Chicago’s Constellation club in January 2021. The band features Jeff, sons Sammy and Spencer Tweedy, Liam Kazar, James Elkington and Sima Cunningham. The live set closes with a cover version of Neil Young’s classic “The Old Country Waltz”.
2025 April
Leaving Time – the 9th studio album from Austin icon Shinyribs – is a fitting return to the roots. Reunited with the artist’s original record label, Nine Mile Records, Leaving Time sets aside the Soul horns and backup singers that have been a staple of the big Shinyribs band, in favor of a more stripped-down approach to this collection of songs.
Producer/multi-instrumentalist David Beck leans into the Americana side of Kevin Russell’s sound, recalling the artist’s early Nine Mile records Well After Awhile & Gulf Coast Museum, as well as the more sincere side of Russell’s legendary band The Gourds.
Joining Russell and Beck in the studio are bassist Mason Hankamer and pedal steel player Marty Muse from the Shinyribs touring band, drummer Dees Stribling (Robert Earl Keen), and keyboardist Jonny Keys (Uncle Lucius).
2025 February
It started in London with a shy fan offering Americana outsider Jim White a gift—an obscure 19th Century novel called Precious Bane. Over the years they kept up a correspondence, with White becoming increasingly intrigued by this shy, impoverished woman who led a fairly desperate hand to mouth existence in the south of England.
That woman is Trey Blake, a neurodivergent artist living in obscurity in Brighton, UK. Growing up with undiagnosed autism, she managed her condition and the resultant inability to function in the mainstream world through various addictions. Along the way she sought to create art (songs, prose & photography) that encompassed both light and dark, drawing on her experiences of brokenness and loss on one hand and transcendent beauty and oneness on the other.
The two have paired up to deliver Precious Bane, a haunting effort that finds them trading songs from across the ocean—her parts being recorded by Joe Watson of Stereolab, whom Trey randomly met in a Brighton coffee shop. Like Jim, Joe was instantly struck by this exotic outsider. The resulting collaboration is an enigmatic sonic journey that transports the listener to a mythic, darkly lyrical soundscape.
Jim White and Joe Watson believe in Trey Blake. Hopefully you will too. She deserves an audience, a high-minded one in fact, one hungry for subtle revelation, one capable of appreciating the beauty of treasures unearthed in ragged, unlikely places; among the weeds, deep in the shadows of being, on the outermost fringes of existence. That’s Trey’s zone.
Vandoliers are a uniquely Texas band, distilling the Lone Star State’s vast and diverse musical identity into a raucous, breakneck vibe that’s all their own. After spending much of the last three years furiously writing and recording music, this Dallas-Fort Worth six-piece is back with The Vandoliers, a new album that proves these rowdy, rollicking country punks are tighter, more cohesive and more sonically compelling than ever.
Forged in the fires of the COVID-19 pandemic, The Vandoliers is the product of a time of immense growth and change for the band. Though most of the record was written in 2019, following the release of their much-acclaimed album Forever, plans changed quickly in March 2020. “It was supposed to be a quick turnaround,” frontman Joshua Fleming says. “After touring with Lucero and the Toadies, we were supposed to go into the studio to knock out an album, and head to Europe for the first time.” That didn’t happen —their tours were canceled, the band’s label folded, and what was to come next was totally up in the air.
Recorded with Grammy-winning producer Eric Delegard at Reeltime Audio in Denton, TX, The Vandoliers is an album interrupted. The band’s original two-week recording session ended abruptly in March 2020 as shutdowns began across the globe. The band didn’t get back into the studio until November, at which point they realized that, like many of the best-laid plans, their original strategy for the record had to change. “We wanted to make an album that had the same power as our live performance — a tight, big sound,” Fleming says. “Through trial and error, label closure, fatherhood, sobriety, relapse, the album grew on its own stylistically. After the hardest two years of my life, we created a collection of songs that push us as musicians, songs that reaffirmed my place as a songwriter and a faith in ourselves as a band I don’t think we had before.”
Amid all that uncertainty, Vandoliers did what they knew best: they made music. First came “Every Saturday Night,” a pandemic-era appreciation of all the rowdy, late-night shows that we all missed while stuck at home. “I thought for sure that this would be the last song I would ever write. I missed all the little things about the life I lived up until that point,” Fleming says. “I missed the smells and tastes of a smoky dive bar, the long overnight drives listening to our favorite bands.” Those thoughts clearly struck a chord with listeners, earning the song heavy rotation on the radio, especially Sirius XM’s Outlaw Country, and jumpstarting the band’s plans to head back into the studio to encapsulate their electric live shows into the album that would eventually grow into The Vandoliers.
The Vandoliers is a manifesto, both sonically and lyrically. It’s an assertion of the band’s distinct character, their sonic rebelliousness, and big, bold stage presence. They’ve got range, too, but that should be expected from a band that deftly blends mariachi horns with country-punk rhythms. On “The Lighthouse,” tender vocals pair with Travis Curry’s delicate fiddle to create a sweet cowpunk lullaby written for Fleming’s one-year-old daughter Ruby Mae, born at the height of the pandemic. And then there’s “Bless Your Drunken Heart,” a hard-driving ode to the town drunk that makes apt use of the South’s favorite passive-aggressive slight and has quickly become a favorite at the band’s live shows, and “I Hope Your Heartache’s a Hit,” a swinging, swaggering tribute to a one-night-stand written by multi-instrumentalist Cory Graves.
Taken all together, this impressive fourth album builds to what is the Vandoliers’ most cohesive effort to date without sacrificing any of the distinct identity that makes the band work as well touring alongside punkers Flogging Molly as they do opening for independent country legends the Turnpike Troubadours or Dallas rockers the Old 97s. Few bands can bring together the square toes and the steel toes quite like the Vandoliers. As its members have grown and matured, so has the sound of Vandoliers. But what remains the same, though, is the band’s core philosophy of solidarity and hope, evidenced by the motto they’ve all had tattooed on their arms: Vandoliers Forever, Forever Vandoliers.
Vandoliers are Joshua Fleming, bassist Mark Moncrieff, drummer Trey Alfaro, fiddler Travis Curry, electric guitarist Dustin Fleming, and multi-instrumentalist Cory Graves. Formed in 2015, the band released 2016’s Ameri-Kinda and 2017’s The Native on State Fair Records, and Forever (2019) on Bloodshot Records.
Shaking off the plague days like a snake sheds its skin the WACO BROTHERS stumble out of the empty, burning desert with a fierce thirst and an epic new album: THE MEN THAT GOD FORGOT. It’s the first collection of original WACO tunes since 2016’s GOING DOWN IN HISTORY and comes to you via their own label Plenty Tuff Records.
The Waco Brothers got together in Chicago in the mid-90s; battle weary punk musicians who wanted nothing more than to play classic country covers for free beer in their adopted home city. Their residencies at bars like the Wrigleyville Tap and Augenblick became legendary for the sheer volume, speed and energy they brought to this task
After an early & particularly deranged appearance at SXSW Rolling Stone dubbed the Wacos “Clash meets Cash” and they unleashed a fistful of ferocious albums and endlessly entertaining live gigs that defined the Insurgent Country movement.
Every night is still Friday night for the WACO BROTHERS but these new songs lace that reckless exuberance with a more sober awareness of the tsunami of cynical corruption & materialism that infects our everyday existence. BEST THAT MONEY CAN BUY rips its verses from what’s left of honest journalism while IN THE DARK provides a requiem for functioning democracy AND boasts the best twin-lead guitar solo since Thin Lizzy. The album ends with NOWHERE TO RUN a deceptively gentle dance number (inspired by a night on the Outlaw Country Cruise where the Wacos backed up their hero Lee “Scratch” Perry) that presents the struggle for social and economic justice as neverending. GEORGE WALKS WITH JESUS is a song about George Jones walking with Jesus.
The WACO BROTHERS lost their powerhouse drummer Joe Camarillo to a stroke in January 2021 and it took some time to regroup. They’d often been joined onstage by violinist Jean Cook and drummer Dan Massey (ex-Robbie Fulks) who had deputized for Joe for years, so now the time seemed right to add them both as permanent members.
THE MEN THAT GOD FORGOT is the 10th Waco Brothers full length album & was recorded with Mike Hagler at Kingsize Soundlabs in Chicago in 2022. The cinematic brass parts were arranged and performed by longtime collaborator Max Crawford with Dave Smith. Other Waco Cousins appearing are Barkley Mckay on piano and organ, Patty Vega on jingling tambourine and Andre Michot of the Lost Bayou Ramblers on accordion.
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