I had such high hopes for Folk Family Revival’s Water Walker on the strength of the opening song, “If It Don’t Kill You.” It’s an edgy, urgent, dark-feeling, guitar-driven tune with some pleasing, unforced vocals from singer Mason Langford (and nice siren-like backing vocals). It’s a good opener, one that feels as if there are real stakes here: something is going to happen.
Ryley Walker’s album Primrose Green feels like it was made by a man unstuck in time. It could be a lost Tim Buckley or Nick Drake album with its jazz-inflected, acoustic guitar-driven pastoral quality. Walker is an amazing guitar player, taking the instrument from gentle, bucolic strumming to aggressively percussive. His fingerpicking is otherworldly.
Vetiver’s Complete Strangers is like a time machine. The tracks range from lo-fi synth escapades to AM radio gold with a dose of late ‘80s/early ‘90s indie rock. It feels completely familiar and quite unusual at the same time, taking classic song structures and putting them in a blender to make something wholly new.
Eighty-two-year-old bluesman Leo “Bud” Welch has recently recorded an album for Fat Possum/Big Legal Mess Records, home of R.L. Burnside and Mississippi Fred McDowell, as well as current favorites Jimbo Mathus and Jim Mize. While being a blues record through and through, I Don’t Prefer No Blues sounds so current and fresh that Jack White is probably gnashing his teeth in envy. I Don’t Prefer No Blues has an incredibly live feeling that features Welch’s well-weathered vocals and his flat-out amazing guitar playing. It’s a stunner of an album, and it’s only his second record (the previous was the all-gospel record Sabougla Voices).
The story of Connie Converse is both fascinating and distressingly common. After leaving college and heading to New York City in 1949, she wrote and recorded poetic, wry, revealing songs accompanying herself on acoustic guitar. Despite intervention and best intentions of friends (animator Gene Deitch and colleague Bill Bernal) who worked to get Converse’s music heard by a wider audience, she abandoned everything. She wrote a series of goodbye notes to friends, packed up her Volkswagen, and disappeared in 1974. No one has heard from her since. She would be 90 now.
While they’re marketed as a roots ensemble and a string band, Lindsay Lou & the Flatbellys have a seriously jazzy vibe to them. They play mandolins, dobros, stand-up bass, steel guitar, and take those instruments to an interesting place: playing them percussively, angularly, expressionistically. Lead vocalist Lindsay Lou’s voice isn’t a rootsy voice, either. There’s a dusky richness to her voice, and her slides from chest voice to upper register are elegant though she makes it sound incredibly easy.
It must be more than a bit daunting to cover the Beatles. They’re The Beatles for the love of Pete, the alpha and the omega, the ones from whom everything good sprung, the band that changed everything. (True fact: I once was friends with a woman who said, “I don’t really like the Beatles.” I realized from that moment that she was a horrible person and I couldn’t be friends with her anymore. And I wasn’t.)
Austin-based indie folkster Joe Pug has weathered a lot of comparisons to Dylan in his career: his lyrics; the unusual timbre of his voice; his gently strummed, chiming guitar. All of the necessary ingredients are here, though on his latest, Windfall, vocally he sounds surprisingly like Jakob Dylan (which, let’s face it: Bob sings like a rusting hinge).
Though they’ve been kicking around for ages (since 2009), Oxford, Mississippi’s Young Buffalo is only now releasing their debut album. It’s a good thing they waited, because House is the kind of debut bands dream of. Full of shimmering synths and pleasing harmonies, the songs are hooky, well-written treats.
Cherry Red Records continues to release some of the most fascinating compilations and reissues with a two-disc version of The Sweet’s debut album, Funny How Sweet Co-Co Can Be. The reissue, 28 tracks of music that range from bubblegum to The Sweet’s much heavier B-sides, is a mixed bag. On one hand, listening to the evolution of the band as they go from Archies-flavored pop to some quite heavy rock is fascinating. On the other, some of the songs are painful. Still, The Sweet were a great band, even when they were churning out silliness.