Luke Bryan’s music has the nutritional value of notebook paper, and is the clinical result of when an entertainer spreads his arms wide in a submissive pose and relents his entire will to the country music industrial complex, saying “Do your worst.” Luke Bryan has no soul. He is more machine than man. He has the integrity of a Guatemalan mule bridge with a squadron of M1 tanks trying to cross it.
With a gift for poetry like Townes Van Zandt, and a penchant for the whimsical, progressive approach to bluegrass akin to John Hartford, Robbie Fulks releases a stunningly entertaining, brilliantly-balanced, deep, yet instantly-engaging comeback album called Gone Away Backward through longtime associates Bloodshot Records.
I know very little about Valerie June, and aspire to keep it that way. A natural mystery swirls around this woman similarly to the tresses emanating from her topside like a living, organic crown. Valerie June seems more apparition than woman—vanishing and appearing in the most random moments like a mythical character born in the mind of an early European troubadour….
Once again a member of the Texas music scene has delivered a song that gives voice and reason to how the rest of us feel. Wade Bowen’s “Trucks” aims its big, diamond-plated bumper at the incessant references to tailgates and four wheel drives in modern pop country songs and slams on the gas.
“Shakespeare Was A Big George Jones Fan: Cowboy Jack Clement’s Home Movies” was made in 2005 to document Jack’s life, and the wild environment swirling around his legendary home studio, the “Cowboy Arms Hotel and Recording Spa.” It is about capturing the spirit of the man—the whimsy that he approached the creative process with.
by all accounts, The Civil Wars latest, self-titled album will be the duo’s swan song. Certain undisclosed, but publicly acknowledged irreconcilable differences have officially split the project in two, and almost kept this album from seeing the light of day altogether. But there’s still this business of 12 new tracks that they’ve released into a world.
Welcome to Saving Country Music’s 2013 Pickathon LIVE blog! We will out at Pickathon all weekend, leaving our thoughts, posting pics, and other bits of information from the fest all weekend. Below you can watch a LIVE stream from the festival’s primary stages, but at any given time, multiple performances might be going on, so check below that in the live blog section for other activities transpiring at Pickathon.
After a six year wait to release an album of original material at the mercy of Curb Records’ career-shattering and sometimes illegal talent retention program, prolonging the release process for artists on their final album with the label nearly indefinitely, the embattled and bruised LeAnn Rimes has finally released “Spitfire.” The chatter around “Spitfire” has been polarizing to darn near bellicose.
Happy 4th of July everyone, and welcome to Saving Country Music’s LIVE blog of the 40th Annual Willie Nelson’s 4th of July Picnic! This year the picnic is being held at the historic Ft. Worth Stockyards in the courtyard outside of Billy Bob’s Texas. In between barbecuing and shooting off Black Cats, please check back as we post pictures, observances, and a play-by-play of the event.
If you would’ve told The Avett Brothers back in 2007 when they released their album Emotionalism that in five years, the best-selling album in all of music would be from a roots band playing acoustic instruments and featuring emotional, singer/songwriter material, they’d probably call you crazy. But that is the power one album can have to launch a formidable music career…
If equality is what Blake Shelton was looking to strike in the video for “Boys ‘Round Here,” then he deserves a big pat on the back. Because anything and everything about this eye-raping edifice to the universal monoculture and hyper-driven consumer excess mixed with vomit-inducing racial tokenism is as equally repulsive as it is embarrassing.
In direct violation of every single rule of country music and the State Department’s South American travel warning, Florida-Georgia line flies down to fake Mexico to participate in a music video that becomes one of the most “WHAT THE HELL?!?!” moments in country music history. This music video is only a couple of quaaludes away from a tasteless Girls Gone Wild installment.
I don’t know how this guy does it. Like a quasar, he’s able to endlessly expel creative musical content unfettered from a seemingly inexhaustible source. It’s not always pretty, it’s not always perfect. But if you pay attention long enough and listen, you will invariably witness something that leaves you awe struck.Before And After The Here And Now is a more mellow project compared to typical Olds albums…
Wagon Wheel” isn’t the “Free Bird” of our generation, it is our generation’s sonic equivalent of inserting a corkscrew into your earhole and giving it a nice good healthy turn. The song, initially stolen from a Bob Dylan demo by Old Crow Medicine Show’s Ketch Secor with a “better to ask forgiveness than permission” approach, officially holds the title of the most ubiquitous song in the history of mankind that nobody’s heard.
Jesus may have turned the other cheek, but he also overturned the tables of the money changers in the temple where they didn’t belong. Just like the Romans of biblical times, these pop country fart tards are foreign occupiers who need to get the hell out of country. I don’t pretend to know what Jesus would do, but if I were him, I’d shove my sandal straight up Thomas Rhett’s ass and tell him he could keep his Michelob Ultra.
The first thing that needs to be pointed out is Red is not country. Red is really the tale of two albums: A gorgeous evocation of human emotions set to enchanting music and delivered in elevated modes, and awful pop shit that leaves you almost embarrassed for Taylor from the sheer obviousness of the ploy. To Taylor’s credit, it is the good stuff that makes up the majority of this album.
If 90% of the stuff they play on country radio these days is crap, then Alan represents the 10%. He’s the one respite when the Mrs. or kiddos flip over to 98.1 you don’t want to reach for a 9mm and point it at either your audio interface or your own pie hole. And unlike George Strait, Alan has the skins on the wall of writing a lot of his own material and other memorable achievements for real country fans.
The current landscape of hip American music is like a lyric out of a classic Bob Dylan song about the changing times. Old is new, and nerdy is cool. It is in this environment that the Alabama Shakes have flourished like the imperceptible germs on the tips of your fingers when rubbed into a Petri dish and left to fester. The Alabama Shakes are not for everyone, but I struggle to find a wart to point at.
Marty Stuart is on an amazing roll ladies and gentlemen. What he’s doing right now with lead guitar player “Uncle” Kenny Vaughan and The Fabulous Superlatives is stuff that legends are made of. You know those periods in an artists’ career that you look back on like they can’t do wrong, churning out amazing songs and albums one after another?
I know some were insulted when they rolled up to their beloved Saving Country Music and merely saw the title of this article, and those people can feel free to navigate to the comments section and voice their displeasure. But the simple fact is that Taylor Swift’s Speak Now is already the biggest album in all of music in the last five years, and on its way to being the biggest in a decade whose album sales overall look like an inversion of The Price Is Right’s mountain climber game.
UnIncorporated is a fun album with great songs that is not afraid to get too deep, or at times to be refreshingly immature.
The beauty of this album is it’s roots in truth. When so many Nashville products try to sing about the common man’s common struggles, they have to do it from the outside looking in. What Ronnie is doing is getting what is inside out, to keep his sanity.
Any review for Those Poor Bastards should probably start off with a disclaimer that gothic country is not for everyone. Nor do I claim to be an expert of the music; I’ve always felt like I’m on the outside looking in. Having said that, I have really become intrigued and entertained with what Those Poor Bastards do, and think of Lonesome Wyatt as virtually peerless in procuring sounds to set the exact mood he envisions for songs.
This is not music that you sit back and marvel at the eloquence as your foot taps. It is like a chest-thumping ritual that makes you succumb to the carnal cry of the country. Imagine the music you would hear coming out of a ramshackle shack far out deep in the woods in the dead of night, with a dusty light and the raw energy of people and music bleeding out between the cracks of the old boards that are perceptibly pulsing to the sweaty beat. This is Hillstomp.
Last Rites of Ransom Pride, written by Ray Wylie Hubbard, and starring Dwight Yoakam, Kris Kristofferson, and Lizzy Caplan, is like a Cormac McCarthy novel set to life: brilliant characterization in by-gone, almost mythical settings. This is not a heavily thematic movie, but there is enough plot and artistic attention that you do not walk away feeling like you indulged a guilty pleasure.