Chris Knight released Almost Daylight in 2019, his ninth studio album and his first in seven years. It’s an album that featured guest appearances by Lee Ann Womack and the late John Prine. And he’s been itching to play these songs for folks, but…2020 happened. Continue reading
Filed under Music.
In a year filled with surprise releases, one of the more pleasant among them has been Buckle Bunny, an accidental creation of Birmingham’s Kaydee Mulvehill that sounds like nothing that has come from Birmingham in quite some time.
The six-track EP, Pet Speak, is reminiscent of the female-led indie rock that has dominated rock over the past couple of years. It’s aggressive and it’s raw. It can’t remotely fit under the umbrella of “Americana” that has been where most Birmingham and Alabama artists have sheltered for years; the loosely-drawn “genre” title that has grown to make everyone cringe, one that Mulvehill’s own solo project would be lumped into. No, this happy accident of Mulvehill’s “pandemic art” period is rock and roll. Continue reading
Filed under Music.
Great Peacock is officially a trio for their third studio album, Forever Worse Better, which was released on October 12. Frank Keith IV has been on the road with Andrew Nelson and Blount Floyd for years, but for the first time, he went into the studio with the band.
It’s a rock record the way that Ryan Adams makes rock records; too far from “folk” to be Americana, really. It’s different. It’s not what you came to expect from Nelson and Floyd on 2015’s Making Ghosts or 2018’s Gran Pavo Real. The track “Rock of Ages” showcases that sound pretty well – a louder, fuller pedal steel driven track complemented by the wail of a Sadler Vaden electric solo. Continue reading
Filed under Music.
The pandemic has inspired plenty of art, but it’s also given a lot of artists time to pause. Maybe that has been an excuse to release some old live recordings. Some have created entire new projects that would have otherwise never existed. And some have dug into the archives and found things that we should have heard all along.
For Fiddleworms, the latter gave Russell Mefford and company an opportunity to release the band’s first studio album in eight years. The record has eight tracks, with a bonus track on the download card, “Don’t Shoot the Prophet,” a tune that Mefford wrote with Scott Boyer.
As this collection has come from various recording sessions over the past decade or more, almost every member of the Fiddleworms family makes an appearance: there’s Mefford, Rob Malone [formerly of Drive-By Truckers] and Mitch Mann on vocals and guitars, David MacKay on bass (with an appearance by Matt Ross), John Tombyll and Scott Kennedy on drums, Tombyll and Jimmy Nutt on percussion, Clint Bailey and NC Thurman on piano and organ and a horn section comprised of Brad Guin on tenor sax, Daniel Western on baritone sax, Ken Watters, Shane Porter and Chris Gordon on trumpet and Chad Fisher [St. Paul and the Broken Bones] on trombone. There are also guest background vocal appearances from Donna Jean Godchaux [formerly of Grateful Dead] and Rob Aldridge. Continue reading
Blake Ells 