Recent Music Purchases
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.
Most Music Purchased via Bandcamp: https://bandcamp.com/texas-ace