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| Our Native Daughters |
"Folk and Americana artists used a broad range of approaches, from candid intimacy to commanding austerity to devastating intensity, to tell their stories this year.
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Our Native Daughters - Slave Driver from Songs of Our Native Daughters
The Smithsonian Folkways-issued debut album from Carolina Chocolate Drops frontwoman Rhiannon Giddens, former Carolina Chocolate Drops cellist Leyla McCalla, multi-instrumentalist Allison Russell (Po' Girl, Birds of Chicago), and alt-country/blues singer/songwriter Amythyst Kiah, Songs of Our Native Daughters is a bold, brutal, and often beautiful dissertation on racism, hope, misogyny, agency, and slavery told from the perspective of four of modern roots music's most talented women, who also happen to be black...
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William Tyler - Our Lady of the Desert from Goes West
Although its title suggests a continuation of the pastoral Americana meditations from 2016's wondrous Modern Country, guitarist William Tyler's fourth solo outing is in fact a brighter, occasionally frolicsome set, rife with sublime melodies and executed with an understated confidence. Its title, Goes West, refers not to the dusty cross-country voyages that inspired its predecessor, but to Tyler's recent relocation from his native Nashville to sunny Los Angeles. As on Modern Country, the all-instrumental Goes West again employs a full band, though its leader sticks solely to acoustic guitar with Meg Duffy joining him on electric guitar, James Anthony Wallace on piano, Griffin Goldsmith on drums, and co-producer Bradley Cook covering bass, synths, and a smattering of other instruments...
Allison Moorer - The Ties That Bind from Blood
Allison Moorer is someone who has been through things that most artists could never contemplate. When Moorer was 14 years old, her father shot and killed her mother before taking his own life, and that sort of baggage is something no one fully escapes. Unsurprisingly, Moorer is no stranger to dark themes in her music, but she doesn't wallow in tragedy, and her songs search for a light rather than obsessing on the shadows. Her 2019 album Blood is a musical companion to her memoir, published the same year, that deals with the tragedy that left a mark on her childhood and how she and her older sister (fellow musician Shelby Lynne) struggled to make peace with it. One might expect Blood to be a grand musical statement, given its overriding themes, but that's not the case, and that works to the advantage of the music, which is intimate and immediate, allowing Moorer's vocals to take center stage...
Buddy & Julie Miller - Underneath The Sky from Breakdown on 20th Ave. South
Buddy & Julie Miller are two unique talents who happen to work very well together, which is convenient, since they happen to be married. He's a fine songwriter and an inspired guitarist and producer with a gift for the evocative and atmospheric, while Julie's lyrics are compelling stories of love and human experience that gain greater emotional depth through her voice, which subtly melds vulnerability and strength. While Buddy Miller is one of the busier people in Nashville between his own recordings and his frequent work with others, little has been heard from Julie since she and Buddy released the duet album Written in Chalk in 2009. While health problems kept Julie on the sidelines for most of the 2010s, she was well enough late in the decade to cut a batch of fresh songs with Buddy, and 2019's Breakdown on 20th Ave. South is a welcome reminder of her special talents as a vocalist, songwriter, and collaborator...
Caroline Spence - Wait On The Wine from Mint Condition
Over two full-lengths and one EP, Nashville's Caroline Spence has shown an uncanny knack for portraying the complexities of the human condition in poetically candid little vignettes of warm and weary Americana. Her second LP, 2017's Spades & Roses, earned enough respect and critical acclaim to net her a deal with Rounder Records, the veteran roots-driven label behind her third outing, Mint Condition. Produced by Dan Knobler (Lake Street Dive, Erin Rae), the 11-track set takes no great stylistic leaps, but offers a continued evolution of the journey Spence has been on since she debuted back in 2013...
Rhiannon Giddens - I'm On My Way (with Francesco Turrisi) from There Is No Other
Often, the phrase "there is no other" carries an air of romanticism, but Rhiannon Giddens turns its conventional meaning on its head on her collaboration with Francesco Turrisi. The pair focus directly on "othering," the process of identifying different cultures as alien from a person's own experience -- a phenomenon that the pair refute not only with the title of their 2019 album but the very music it contains. Giddens claims classical music and old-timey folk as her musical heritage; Turrisi is a jazz musician who studied early music -- backgrounds that provide a considerable amount of common ground, something that is evident throughout the restless, haunting There Is No Other. While it's possible to trace individual elements back to their origins -- much of the music churns to a Mediterranean drone, Giddens' dexterous claw-hammered banjo is at the forefront -- it takes close listening to parse these parts, as the duo are determined to emphasize common threads that tie cultures together...
Chuck Mead - Shake from Close to Home
It's hard not to read the title of Close to Home as an admission of the album's contents. Chuck Mead does indeed stick to his Tennessee roots here, which may not be a surprise considering that the former leader of BR5-49 spent much of the 2010s directing the music on the Million Dollar Quartet musical and supervising the soundtrack for the CMT show Sun Records, and Close to Home does indeed bear a big rockabilly heart. Recorded with producer Matt Ross-Spang, who's helmed records by John Prine, Jason Isbell, and Margo Price, at Sam Phillips Recording Studios, Close to Home boasts a style that evokes old sounds and styles without doggedly replicating the past. It's an appealing combination...
Eilen Jewell - Working Hard for Your Love from Gypsy
Returning to original material after the 2017 covers album Down Hearted Blues, Eilen Jewell is unusually engaged with the modern world on Gypsy. This doesn't mean the singer/songwriter is abandoning her Americana for country-pop. With its smoldering, swampy groove and sawing fiddles, the opening "Crawl" makes it clear that Jewell continues to mine and fuse all aspects of American roots music; she's as comfortable with country as she is soul. What gives Gypsy its contemporary kick is how Jewell stares directly at the political turmoil that's roiling America in the waning years of the 2010s...
Grace Cummings - Other Side from Refuge Cove
A young folk artist with a commanding, rough-hewn voice and forthright approach, Australian singer/songwriter Grace Cummings makes her auspicious debut with Refuge Cove. Bearing a classic tone that recalls the '60s folk revival infused with some of rock's raw power, Cummings began making the rounds in her native Melbourne in 2018, quickly building a buzz that was intensified after an online video of her covering Bob Dylan's "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" led to a contract with Flightless Records, the label spearheaded by local psych faves King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard. Rather than mess with a winning formula, the label wisely chose to capture their new signee in her natural format, recording live in a room with just an acoustic guitar and her throaty, dominating voice bouncing off the walls. What minor piano and guitar overdubs there are always serve the basic composition of the songs. Alternating between earthy poeticism and honest observations, Cummings tries to make sense of both her inner and outer worlds, drawing the audience in with an intimacy that doesn't suffer from the usual self-conscious pitfalls of confessionalism...
Her Crooked Heart - Enough from To Love To Leave To Live
Indie folk-rock outfit led by charismatic Minneapolis-based singer/songwriter and producer Rachel Ries.
The project of Minneapolis-based musician Rachel Ries, Her Crooked Heart delivers an elegantly rendered debut of intertwined narratives set amongst beautifully layered arrangements that incorporate lush chamber pop, jazz, and experimental folk. Culled from the personal tumult following her 2013 divorce, the material on To Love To Leave To Live leans heavily into Ries' emotional transformations both as a person and an artist. Leaving not only her marriage behind, but also a previous recording career under her own name, she inhabits this new endeavor with a crackling energy wrought from the sadness, excitement, anxiety, and other raw elements of her sea change...
James Yorkston - My Mouth Ain't No Bible from The Route to the Harmonium
In the five intervening years between 2014's Cellardyke Recording and Wassailing Society and its follow-up, The Route to the Harmonium, James Yorkston recorded two albums as part of the earthy minimalist trio Yorkston/Thorne/Khan, founded an ambitious folk club in his native Fife, and published his debut novel, 3 Craws. Since debuting in 2002, the Scottish folk singer has consistently maintained a prolific and multifaceted output, and as his career has progressed, his albums have increasingly reflected this sort of all-in-one art form, often bypassing typical folk song structures and coming across as a sort of freewheeling panoply of ideas and layers. Like its predecessor, The Route to the Harmonium, his ninth solo outing, combines a sort of meandering personal journal approach with arrangements that veer from solitary fingerpicking to robust stacks of brass, drums, and an unusual amount of zither...
Jeremy Ivey - Diamonds Back To Coal from The Dream and the Dreamer
Although he's been a fixture of Nashville's indie music scene since the mid-2000s, Jeremy Ivey has largely assumed the role of collaborator, playing in bands like Secret Handshake and Buffalo Clover, and serving as guitarist and sideman to his wife, country singer/songwriter Margo Price. In terms of asserting himself as a frontman, the 41-year-old is a bit of a late bloomer, but his strong solo debut for the Anti- label is a testament to waiting until you're ready. On The Dream and the Dreamer, the Georgia native offers up nine thoughtful, tastefully written cuts that traverse '60s-inspired country-rock, folk sensibility, and indie pop melodicism, peppered with a few hazy plumes of light psychedelia. Recorded at Nashville's all-analog Reel Recording and mixed at the historic Sam Phillips Recording in Memphis, the album manages to tip its hat to the methods of an earlier era without all the self-congratulatory throwback baggage that so many similarly inclined Americana artists feel compelled to flaunt...
Joan Shelley - Cycle from Like the River Loves the Sea
Joan Shelley hails from Kentucky, and her best music reflects the placid, Sunday evening sound of life in the rural American South. So why did she travel to Reykjavik, Iceland to record her fifth solo album, 2019's Like The River Loves The Sea? That's anyone's guess, but the results show it was an experiment that worked, and worked well for her. The sweet, smokey sadness of Shelley's voice has rarely been better served than it is on these sessions, blending a folkie clarity and quaver with a natural soulfulness that gives her performances a strength that betrays the subtlety of the presentation. There's a natural intimacy to Shelley's lyrics -- she doesn't deal in grand conceits, being more comfortable pondering the more compact themes of human relationships -- and as a vocalist she respects their scale, but she finds in them a universality that lends them a power plenty of more bombastic writers could never match. Shelley, co-producer and multi-instrumentalist James Elkington, and a small crew of Icelandic musicians have made Like The River Loves The Sea a model of artful restraint...
John Southworth - Obscurantism from Miracle in the Night
In what feels like a briefer, inland-dwelling sequel to 2014's tour de force, Niagara, Miracle in the Night distills into its 11 tracks the kind of enigmatic moonlit fantasia that could only come from the singular mind of John Southworth. Twelve albums into his career, the English-Canadian songwriter's reputation as a smart-pop mysterioso only deepens as he continues his transformation into the hushed blend of acoustic jazz, folk, and chamber pop that has more or less marked his later output. Assembled with great craft by his longtime band the South Seas, Miracle in the Night is a wonder of earthen poeticism, peculiar observations, and beautifully captured instrumentation. Amidst the gentle piano voicings, pump organ, and brushed drum parts, Southworth's distinctive voice whispers and croons, occasionally flexing its power like a sudden night wind...
Kim Lenz - Hourglass from Slowly Speeding
On her fifth album, Kim Lenz delivers her most stylistically broad production to date with twangy songs dusted with themes of pain, desire, and the supernatural. Lenz, who first emerged in the '90s with her trademark backing group the Jaguars, is largely known as a queen of traditional rockabilly, a torchbearer of the swaggering, wickedly sexy style of '50s female rock icons like Barbara Pittman, Wanda Jackson, and Janis Martin. With Slowly Speeding, she expands upon this approach, exploring ever more nuanced aspects of the Americana tradition. At the core of the album is the title track, a woozy, slow country waltz with a backwards guitar intro and haunting pedal steel lines...
Lillie Mae - Some Gamble from Other Girls
Collaborating with producer Dave Cobb helps Lillie Mae simultaneously sharpen and expand her focus -- a nifty, subtle trick that fuels Other Girls, her second album for Third Man Records. Lillie Mae operates in an undefined territory where ancient and modern music meet, a place where bluegrass can seem spacy but not quite lonesome. This is a distinct, delicate balance, one she hinted at on Forever and Then Some, but Other Girls benefits from Cobb adding a sense of spectral melancholy to the proceedings. It's a quality that's thankfully not overplayed; it's there just enough to add dimension and mystery, emotions that still linger when the record turns and eases into something a little simpler. Lillie Mae's high, keening voice is suited for such stylized plaints but the reason Other Girls works as well as it does is that it's not solely sad...
Lula Wiles - Love Gone Wrong from What Will We Do
If there's a latent hesitancy in the title of What Will We Do, Lula Wiles' debut for Smithsonian Folkways, there's nothing tentative about the trio on this 2019 album. Isa Burke, Eleanor Buckland, and Mali Obomsawin project a confidence throughout What Will We Do, an attitude reflected in the casual swagger of their string band as well as their flinty tales of living in the murk of modern America...
Michael Chapman - It's Too Late from True North
...True North couldn't be more of a contrast. This is almost a full-circle return to his earliest years as a recording artist; musically it charts directly from 1969's Rainmaker and 1970's Fully Qualified Survivor. True North couldn't be more organic. Gunn returns as producer, plays lead guitar, and alternates with Chapman on bass and drums (the latter used sparingly at best). Chapman's glorious, innovative, mantra-like fingerstyle playing guides every song...
Rustin Man - Judgement Train from Drift Code
Seventeen years separate Rustin Man's 2002 debut album Out of Season and its follow-up, but in the best possible way, Drift Code sounds like it took a lifetime to make. In some respects, it did. After Out of Season's release, Rustin Man's Paul Webb spent time raising his family and turning an old barn into his home and the studio where he painstakingly created the songs that became Drift Code. Working with drummer Lee Harris -- a lifelong friend and member of his other bands, Talk Talk and .O.rang -- Webb recorded each instrument with a number of microphone placements that allowed him to take his pick of imaginary "rooms" when he put the songs together. This intricate process deepens the cloistered, strangely timeless feel that Out of Season introduced, but as gorgeous as that album's blend of Beth Gibbons' vocals and Webb's arrangements was, Drift Code feels like the true introduction to Rustin Man. This is the first set of songs Webb wrote for his own voice, and what a voice it is: Weathered, tremulous yet surprisingly versatile, it's as if the years it took for Drift Code to come to fruition shaped his vocals into the perfect instrument for its contemplative songs...
Ryan Bingham - Got Damn Blues from American Love Song
It's hard to imagine a comeback as rowdy and realized as American Love Song. The double album isn't merely Ryan Bingham's first in four years, it's his most confident since his brief flirtation with the mainstream at the dawn of the 2010s. Bingham's retreat from the spotlight was fueled in part by personal issues -- both of his parents died in the early 2010s, a loss chronicled on 2012's Tomorrowland -- but he also seemed at ease releasing modest albums on his own Axster Records imprint. American Love Song also appears on Axster, but it's the furthest thing from modest. Chalk some of this up to co-producer Charlie Sexton, who gives the album's 15 songs a rough-and-tumble feel suited for backwoods Texas juke joints. Sexton, who plays plenty of greasy guitar on the album as well, pushes Bingham to play with grit and heart, a move that makes the record a pleasure on a pure musical level; it's the sound of a great group of players laying into earthy grooves, no matter if they're rave-ups or sunset strums...
Patty Griffin - The Wheel from Patty Griffin
Patty Griffin is a gifted artist who has no fear of expressing her heart and soul and doesn't hide behind empty artifice in her music. It's a bit surprising that she had never made an LP called Patty Griffin before releasing her self-titled tenth studio album in 2019, just because Patty Griffin is such a simple, straightforward, and honest description of the music inside. That description holds true for most of Griffin's best music, yet it seems particularly apt for this album; on Patty Griffin, the songs and the performances sound remarkably open and unguarded, with the spare, primarily acoustic arrangements adding focus and emphasis to the intimacy of her voice, an instrument of sure and measured fervor. Patty Griffin was written and recorded during a difficult period in her life, while she was being treated for cancer and briefly lost her voice, and themes of mortality and loss are certainly present in this music...
The Delines - The Imperial from The Imperial
It took the Delines five years to deliver The Imperial, the sequel to their 2014 debut, Colfax. Much of the delay can be explained by a car accident singer Amy Boone suffered in March 2016, but the delay wound up working in the band's favor, as it gave time for songwriter/guitarist Willy Vlautin to craft an extraordinary set of ten songs. Whenever he's not slinging a guitar, Vlautin is a novelist, a talent evident in how the songs on The Imperial are built upon evocative, telling details that create their own little world; the ten tracks play like interconnected short stories, not songs...
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