July 22, 2024
Scott Foley, purveyor of dust
If everything goes as planned, you'll be noticing some alterations to our humble online abode. In the days and weeks to come, we'll be pushing out just a bit, incorporating more words about our kind of music, more original content, and even some artist interviews and some podcast-ish stuff.
Our first focus is on developing a daily publication schedule that we're imagining might look something like this:
Sunday - our weekly Spotify ROUTES-cast
Monday - Traipsing thru the Aisles: shorter original capsule reviews
Tuesday - our weekly longform original review
Wednesday - Lookback Machine: devoted to stuff from past years
Thursday - A Routes & Branches Guide To Feeding Your Monster: our weekly news round-up
Friday - What's So Great About This Week?!! (our favorite songs from the week)
We'll humbly, solemnly celebrate sixteen years of bringing readers music that matters in August, nearly two decades during which we've efforted consistency, excellence, and purposeful evolution. While we tend to write most often in third person (we-we-we), this entire thing has been the colicky lovechild of just one guy - me. We have no plans for this to change, providing I'm able to juggle everything without help. That said, your active support genuinely matters. Please email to routesandbranches@gmail.com with any questions, concerns, ideas, opinions, etc. In the days to come we'll debut a Patreon page for those who would like to express their support monetarily.
So thank you for your continued attention. Watch this space! Check back on a regular basis, maybe subscribe to this page so that you're notified whenever we publish something new.
Onward!
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From Nashville by way of Indiana, Connell partners with producer Tucker Martine, expanding the boundaries set by her 2021 debut (Calumet Queen). The songwriter augments her thrift store chic with strains of gothic country, her theatrical voice crackling with electricity that straddles strength and vulnerability. On "Coming Up Empty", Connell bemoans No one does the little things / Like screaming punk songs outta key, while holding hands and driving down the highway. "Restless Bones" mourns the tragic loss of a childhood friend: It's always too soon / No matter the age / But dead at 16 is its own kinda pain. She shines brightest when she steps into the crunch and grind of songs like "Damn Hands" and "On the Mend" (I'm armored as a cactus). "Through To You" rides a rocking country edge, a setting that frees Connell's powerful delivery to bite.
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In 2021, Avi Vincour and Patrick Dyer Wolf (together they are Goodnight, Texas) contributed a track to Metallica Blacklist, a sprawling, multi-genre tribute to the heavy rock quartet. The duo have also since joined Metallica onstage and on television. The metal band's guitarist Kirk Hammett has repaid the favor with an atypically ripping solo on "Runaways" from GNTX's new Signals collection. Since their 2012 Long Life Of Living, the songwriters have fostered their brand of roots rock, demonstrating a fondness for setting fascinating histories and locales to song. Here, the legendary fugitive is given a driving Violent Femmes treatment on "Ghost Of DB Cooper", and the low slung riff of "Dry Heat" plays like a desert southwest travelogue. While much of Signals delivers an unexpectedly guitar-forward mix, songs like "Lightning and the Old Man Todd" or the cinematic "North Dakota" allow GNTX's acoustic nuance to shine through. Elsewhere, "Among Tumbleweeds" lands like a mid-period Son Volt track, set among a field of whispering tombstones: Among tumbleweeds / And yucca flowers / Is a town of crows / On decaying towers. 2018's Conductor and '22's How Long Will It Take Them To Die largely hinted at the possibilities of a larger, more ambitious sound. On Signals, Vincour and Dyer Wolf deliver on the promise.
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Rainy Eyes is Irena Eide, raised in Norway before following her passions to San Francisco and then Lafayette, Louisiana. Her second full-length project is a co-production with the great multi-instrumentalist Dirk Powell, sessions that invite some of that Louisiana to sink in while also enriching the mix with elements of folk, bluegrass, and blues. Alt.country cuts like "Little Dream" and "Lonesome Highway" add banjo and fiddle to the electric arrangements, while "Little Dream" favors a bluegrass lilt. Powell's own daughters contribute value-added backing vocals to songs like the bluesy "You Just Want What You Can't Have", and Eide even verges on Lucinda territory for the lovely "Monday's Gonna Come Around" to close the album. Asked to pinpoint a record from this year that ably epitomizes all that is americana, I'd confidently turn to Lonesome Highway. Eide plans a collection of children's music, Little Folkies, to be released on Smithsonian Folkways this fall.
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