So. The official country music douche Brantley Gilbert has himself a #1 song in the form of “Country Must Be Country Wide.” Our enemy has a new face friends and neighbors, and that face has a penciled-on beard and hoop earrings. Gilbert, his rising fame, and this song’s success are due in large part to the blurring of genre lines between popular music.
There is nothing I take more seriously than naming what I think is the best album of any calendar year. The Album of the Year offers a guidepost for future generations to find the best music that was forgotten by the mainstream, while at the same time being a current ambassador to the mainstream to illustrate what great music they are overlooking.
The greatest element of this film is that it captures with great wisdom that Charlie Louvin’s life was a victory. The epitaph that it conveys with a bold starkness is simply “He won.” The moral of the story is that victory is within anyone’s reach. That is the everlasting message to go with Charlie Louvin’s everlasting influence on American music.
If you’re a tragic, tragic audiofile like myself, then you understand just what a blessing it is when out of the blue you discover an artist that really speaks to you, and it opens a brand new vein of music for you to enjoy for years to come. This is the experience most people come away with when hearing Willy Tea Taylor for the first time.
Since country is such a traditional art form, as soon as you interject a hip-hop element into the music (rapping, drum loops, samples, whatever) it ceases to be country, and instantly becomes hip-hop. He wouldn’t think once about calling his songs country. In other words, there is no country rap. There’s country, and there’s hip hop.
Once again I sit down to review an album originating on Music Row, which means some will have an immediate negative reactionary response about why their little Saving Country Music is selling out for a pop country star, while others will come to sing the praises of how Miranda Lambert is the one to save country music.
Frequent visitors to Saving Country Music know how much of a proponent of Reno, NV’s Hellbound Glory I am. If you want to accuse Saving Country Music of being the house organ of Hellbound Glory, guilty as charged. I’m not just drinking the Hellbound Kool-Aid, I’m slapping two fingers on the inside of my arm, looking for a vein to mainline the stuff right in.
My overall grade of the 2011 CMA Awards would be “not terrible.” Jason Aldean could have swept the awards, and ushered in a new era in country music where a country rap song was the reigning Song of the Year. But Taylor’s Entertainer of the Year victory at least means that at least a little authenticity is still alive in the “country” genre. Or at least for another year.
The heavy thematic focus on Texas and Oklahoma in Red Dirt music is what has made the movement strong throughout that region. It’s also what keeps it from progressing beyond. I’ve always believed that good songwriting allows you to look past proper names, and delve into the meaning of what a songwriter is attempting to convey. Jason Boland does this in Rancho Alto.
“Life Is Beautiful” is a laundry list song; a laundry list song that schools all of it’s counterparts by simply being honest, and thankful. It is one of the best songs of the year, and not a better, more necessary year could it have been presented to us. It is a masterpiece, and if it doesn’t move you, then well, I just give up. So give up 4 minutes of your time, and change your life.
In 99 Lives, Hunnicutt creates a circle of wisdom through fearlessly conveying his personal, intimate experiences in life, and by intimating his fears and frailties, and his victories against them. Honesty is the benchmark of all great albums, and 99 Lives’s honesty is unchecked, complimented by the most powerful voice in all of independent country roots.
One of the most pressing questions I’ve seen about his music in the context of his new album Bad As Me is if it should be considered “roots” or “Americana.” 7 years ago, when Waits put out his last real original album, I would have probably said no, but loaded with qualifiers. Today my answer would be “absolutely.”
Caleb’s name deserves equal billing beside the other top shelf independent roots artists from across the country. And though you may have not heard of Caleb until recently, or just right now, the 40-year-old with flecks of gray hair sticking out from under his trucker hat has been touring and making music for 20 years now. It just has not always been music that bears his name.
Here at Saving Country Music, we have put ourselves squarely on the front lines of opposing the infiltration of hip hop into the country genre, or possibly, the takeover of country by hip-hop, that seems to be pervading the current mainstream country music landscape. Unlike many others that flee from this fight, I am willing to take the charges of racism and closed-mindedness…
I’m not sure many other artists, even the ones that are big Johnny Cash fans, would be up for pulling this project off with this adeptness. It would almost take a small team of musical historians, creative writers, and musicians to evoke what Dale Watson does in a seemingly effortless manner simply from his fandom, understanding, and deep appreciation for The Man in Black.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t remember Hank Williams ever recording any drunken sea shantys. I can’t remember any Ol’ Hank songs featuring trumpets, or classically-styled lilting mandolin parts either. And I guess the Hank song that is built around incongruent, sloppily-overdubbed harmonies is on that $70 box set I could never get the scratch to buy.
Listen to me and listen good. This new Boomswagglers lineup, with Steven Bracamontez on guitar, and Natalie McDougall on drums has it. And when I say ‘it’, I’m not just saying it’s good, I mean it has that undefinable thing that when you watch it live, it makes the hair stand up on the back of your neck, the kind of ‘it’ that overrides appeal based simply on taste.
When it comes to one man bands, Scott H. Biram is the franchise. He is the top of the heap, the one that inspired so many others. He’s tussled with semi trucks and spilled his guts out on the highway just like he’s spilled his guts out on countless stages all across the Western world until he earned that glorious ‘H’ in the middle of his name.
When I saw a new Ryan Adams album was coming down the pike, I honestly didn’t know what to think. I’ve been so hot and cold on the guy over the years as he shape shifts from the whims of identity crises and style changes, it’s harder to form a solid opinion about him than it is to conjure up a firm stool after 6 weeks in interior Mexico.
So many bands try to imbibe their music with a vintage feel and Western space by using copious amounts of chorus or reverb. Guitar player, singer, and songwriter Ryan Eastlyn takes the road less traveled with the use of moaning, melodic chorus lines that are so excellent, they vault this band from a relative unknown to one responsible for one of the better albums put out so far in 2011.
Simply put, John Hartford’s Aereo-Plain is one of my top 10 albums of all time. The key to Aereo-Plain was preserving the visceral elements of bluegrass, the tie to the roots and the mastery of instrumentation, while combining it with the depth of folk-inspired songwriting, intelligent humor, and then adding an enlightened sense of tempo and chord progressions.
This is music to get you moving. I can’t listen to this album at home. I’ll get flying around and break things. I can only listen while driving, with a foot pumping on the gas pedal to the groove. If somebody was listening to this album and wasn’t at least bobbing their head or tapping their foot, the next thing I’d do is put a mirror in front if their mouth.
From Columbus, OH, the lovely and talented 21-year-old Lydia Loveless offers up her first album with international aspirations in Indestructable Machine, through the Bloodshot Records imprint. Rest assured, I like this album more than I don’t. But as legendary football coach Bill Parcells once said after one decent game by a young, promising quarterback, “Put the anointing oil away.”
Some will always question, or maybe even feel threatened by the diversity that seems to be attracted by underground country shows. I for one have always been amazed, mesmerized, proud, and humbled by that same diversity. That diversity, in the crowds, in the music, in ourselves, is the true strength of the insurgent roots movement, it it our ace in the hole. It is the badge of our open-mindedness. And it is beautiful.