featuring the very best of americana, alt.country and roots music
January 15, 2023
Scott Foley, purveyor of dust
Since last we posted, those ever-reliable music floodgates hath opened, gushing forth with a litany of new release announcements. You'll find every single one of 'em by clicking on A Routes & Branches Guide To Feeding Your Monster. We'll point out just five here, including Iris Dement's first project in seven years. Workin' On a World drops February 24, courtesy of the songwriter's FlariElla label. The side-hustle of longtime rock photographer Mark Seliger, Rusty Truck returns on that same day. The collective's self-titled third album features contributions by Sheryl Crow among others. Veteran singer-songwriters Mike Stinson and Johnny Irion have cast their lot together for their next release. Working My Way Down is due on March 24 (Blackwing). AC Newman's rotating cast of contributors, New Pornographers, return with a March 31 offering. Continue As a Guest is their first LP for the Merge label. Finally, Country Westerns' 2020 debut was an unexpected R&B favorite. The trio return on April 28 with Forgive the City on Fat Possum Records.
The past couple months, Pony Bradshaw has been floating chapters of his North Georgia Rounder LP, two songs at a time (January 27). The follow-up to 2019's Sudden Opera and '21's Calico Jim further refines his portrait of the land and the people he calls home, a mural of dreamlike myth and vivid real-life detail. Where Calico Jim cast an eye towards politics and social unrest, Bradshaw's new collection is a more personal travelogue, pictures from the roving mind of a restless traveling songwriter: Bucking to the rhythm of old Appalachia.
While his reportage is as reliable as Steve Fromholz's legendary Texas Trilogy, Pony Bradshaw is not a traditional storyteller. There are few clean narrative arcs on North Georgia Rounder. Instead, songs like "Foxfire Wine" leave their mark in a series of abiding impressions, fleeting glimpses into the endangered species that populate this stretch of Appalachia. Bradshaw and his cohorts spawn a jammy vibe with chiming guitar and glints of pedal steel, the singer encouraging listeners to follow the songlines. While select tunes lay down these rambling road rhythms, most of the record is bluesy or deliberately paced. We've got ballads sliding out our shirtsleeves, Bradshaw sings on "A Free Roving Mind". Low-slung guitar gives the tune a swampy spirit.
North Georgia Rounder pairs the artist with capable collaborators like fellow songwriters Will Stewart, and Phillipe Bronchtein (Hip Hatchet). Together they cast a subtle spell that perfectly complements Bradshaw's lyrical visions, reflections of a man who is 42 and living out of my van. He speaks to the few recurring objects of his days on "A Duffel, A Grip, and My D35", as well as to the Eternal trouble / In the blood, in the blood, in the blood / Of our kind. Weary pedal steel and a brushed drum lay beneath the singer's stirring vocal, a weave of Lyle Lovett's classic country twang and Slaid Cleaves' working class folk delivery. You can't blame a man, he sings, for keeping warm in the halls of fellowship.
Pony Bradshaw's songs aren't the first to speak to these fleeting moments of meeting that pepper the roadside. Steadily plucked strings introduce the album's title track, joined on the chorus by the vamp of a full band: We came to drink, we came to dance, we came to sing our troubles away ... playing these foothill stomps. Bradshaw knows better than most songwriters how the words he chooses sound alongside one another. He begins the forlorn "Holler Rose": I wiped away the tears like they was flies on the melon. The lyrics of North Georgia Rounder can often read like poetry, especially when Bradshaw drops names of rivers and towns, people and places like incantations.
Calico Jim effectively introduced us to this geography-bound travelogue of Pony Bradshaw, a warts-and-all loveletter to his Appalachian foothills that suggests Wendell Berry's Port Royal or Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County. On the downcast "Safe In the Arms of the Vernacular", he sings of being Left on the dirty steps of time just like an orphan. Bradshaw reminds listeners on the deceptively upbeat "Go Down Appalachia": Old times here ain't forgotten. A terrific sounding record, arrangements on North Georgia Rounder are often as thoughtful as the lyrics and ideas. In vision, execution and pure listener satisfaction, the project represents the apotheosis (to use one of Bradshaw's five-dollar words) of what we call americana music.
- Aoife O'Donovan, "Drover" Apathy Sessions (Yep Roc, Jan 27) D
- Why Bonnie, "Apple Tree" single (Keeled Scales, 23) D
- Meg Baird, "Ashes Ashes" Furling (Drag City, Jan 27)
- Fran, "God" Leaving (Fire Talk, Jan 27)
- Margo Price, "Radio (ft Sharon Van Etten)" Strays (Loma Vista, 23)
- Half Gringa, "No Kind of Fire" Ancestral Hope EP (Half Gringa, Jan 27)
- Yo La Tengo, "Aselestine" This Stupid World (Matador, Feb 10)
- New Pornographers, "Really Really Light" Continue As a Guest (Merge, Mar 31) D
- Complete Mountain Almanac, "February" Complete Mountain Almanac (Bella Union, Jan 27)
- Sunny War, "New Day" Anarchist Gospel (New West, Feb 3)
- Adeem the Artist, "Heritage of Arrogance" White Trash Revelry (Four Quarters, 22)
- Doug Paisley, "Sometimes It's So Easy" Say What You Like (Outside, Mar 17)
- Iris Dement, "Workin' On a World" Workin' On a World (FlariElla, Feb 24) D
- Shootouts, "I'll Never Need Anyone More (ft Raul Malo)" Stampede (Shootouts, Feb 24)
- Drayton Farley, "Norfolk Blues" Twenty On High (Hargrove, Mar 3) D
- Mike Stinson & Johnny Irion, "Working My Way Down" Working My Way Down (Blackwing, Mar 24) D
- Channing Wilson, "Drink That Strong" single (Ol' Dog, 22)
- Myron Elkins, "Good Time Girl" Factories Farms & Amphetamines (Low Country Sound, 23)
- Brit Taylor, "Ain't a Hard Livin'" Kentucky Blue (Cut A Shine, Feb 3)
- Whitehorse, "Sanity, TN" I'm Not Crying You're Crying (Six Shooter, 23)
- Layng Martine Jr, "Music Man" Music Man (Kill Rock Stars, May 19) D
- Dougie Poole, "Nothing On This Earth Can Make Me Smile" Rainbow Wheel of Death (Wharf Cat, Feb 24)
- Mother Hips, "Room Four" When We Disappear (Blue Rose, Jan 27)
- LA Edwards, "Already Gone" Out of the Heart of Darkness (Bitchin, 23)
- Rusty Truck, "Find My Way (ft Sheryl Crow)" Rusty Truck (Rusty Truck, Feb 24) D
- The No Ones, "Song For George" My Best Evil Friend (Yep Roc, Mar 31) D
- Country Westerns, "It's a Livin'" Forgive the City (Fat Possum, Apr 28) D
- Lonnie Holley, "Oh Me Oh My (ft Michael Stipe)" Oh Me Oh My (Jagjaguwar, Mar 10) D
- The Arcs, "Sunshine" Electrophonic Chronic (Easy Eye, Jan 27)
- Nude Party, "Ride On" Rides On (New West, Mar 10) D
--------------------------
Earlier ROUTES-casts have been removed; subscribe to our Spotify page to keep up with all our new playlists!
No comments:
Post a Comment