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Recorded at Muscle Shoals in 1973: a feelingly spare, beautifully restrained concept album about a divorce, devoting a side to each point of view.
‘This is a hell of an emotional record, where even the celebratory honky tonk numbers are muted by sadness. Then, there are the centerpieces: Walkin’, where the woman decides it’s time to move on; Pretend I Never Happened, perhaps the coldest ending to a relationship ever written; Bloody Mary Morning, a bleary-eyed morning-after tale that became a standard; It’s Not Supposed to Be That Way, a nearly unbearably melancholy account of a love gone wrong; and Heaven and Hell, a waltz summary of the relationship. Any two of these would have formed a strong core for an album, but placed together in a narrative context, their impact is even more considerable. As a result, this is not just one of Willie Nelson’s best records, but one of the great concept albums overall’ (AllMusic).
‘***** beautiful, deeply affecting… hard to beat as the year’s most worthwhile reissue’, The Guardian; ‘magnificent… wonderfully austere’, Time Out.
‘Returns to original composition and the blues… with a freshness and authority that nostalgic retreads cannot deliver… Three songs (Odds Against Tomorrow, The Writhing Jar, Already Old) are multi-tracked, an innovation that, for guitar buffs familiar with Orcutt’s stripped-down vernacular, jumps out of the grooves like a Les Paul sound-on-sound excursion in 1948, or a Jandek blues rave-up in 1987. Specifically evoking John Lee Hooker’s double-track experiments on 1952’s Walking the Boogie, the steady chord vamps of Odds Against Tomorrow and Already Old form a harmonic turf on which Orcutt solos with lyrical abandon. The Writhing Jar’s crashing overdubs recall the brassy six-string voicings of This Heat or Illitch. With the exception of the unreconstructed Elmore James-isms of Stray Dog’ and the Layla-finale-like haze of All Your Buried Corpses Begin To Speak, the remaining non-overdubbed tracks dovetail snugly with Orcutt’s previous solo output, reeling gently in a Mazzacane-oid mode or vibing up the standards (Moon River)... Odds Against Tomorrow challenges contemporary solo guitar practice in a way that simultaneously nullifies hazy dreams of folk purity and establishes a new high-water mark for blues-rock reconstruction” (Tom Carter).
‘The trance blues stylings of Otha Turner and his Rising Star Fife And Drum Band should be a music classification unto itself, a whole new primitive take on drum and bass. This music is the oldest still-practiced post-colonial American music, and Turner was one of its greatest artists of the 20th century. Blowing the cane fife with a band of drummers as back up, The Rising Star Fife And Drum band was legendary in the hills of Tate County, Mississippi, where they would perform during the yearly goat picnics on Turner’s farm. These tracks were recorded by Luther Dickinson during such picnics and released when Turner was ninety years old. Everybody Hollerin’ Goat shows firsthand the hypnotic and rhythmic style of fife and drum music at its best — raw and beautiful. It is every bit as essential a document of America’s folk-music heritage as anything Harry Smith or Alan Lomax ever offered up for posterity. This first ever vinyl release of Everybody Hollerin’ Goat contains a whole side of unreleased recordings from one night of the picnic and is intended to bring the experience of hollerin’ for goat in Senatobia, Mississippi to the living room. Dancing around the plants is recommended (but don’t eat the pickled eggs).’
This is a great way into Partch, revisiting with gusto three well-known, relatively-compact works — a highly rhythmic dance piece, a cross-cutting film score, and Barstow, with HP intoning hitchhiker graffiti.
Quite different to A Wonder Working Stone and Spoils, the ten songs here are ‘sparse, intimate and concise. The focus throughout is on Alasdair’s deft acoustic fingerstyle guitar and his voice. The songs are variously elliptical and gnomic, direct and personal, romantic and tender.’ With sparing, decisive contributions on clarinet and tin whistle — and from Crying Lion.
A treat for those of us who like their Alasdair Roberts straight-up and hardcore. A pointed, deep selection of mainly Scottish folk songs, recorded live in the studio; beautifully sung, with minimal, exquisite accompaniment by acoustic guitar, or sometimes piano. Sexual oppression, Scottishness, political resistance; stray cows, mystical horses, waterbird royalty. Stiff shots of rapture, fighting talk, heartbreak, and tragedy. Terrific.
Lowdown lap steel and Telecaster collaborations with D. Charles Speer and The Helix, inspired by Link Wray,
Twenty-one songs, running right back to 1971: assured, lovely, intelligent, good-humoured singer-songwriting, mixing up Americana, folk, pop, art rock, and gentle experimentalism.
‘Their ability to harmonize together is stunning, their reedy voices coming together and pulling apart amid delicate fingerstyle guitar and concertina deployed in just intonation, which imparts a deeply resonant, almost glowing harmonic presence. It’s all quite subtle, and if you only listen to the way the voices of Cater and Rasten blend you might even miss it—but the full sonic spectrum is what distinguishes and, in certain ways, connects it to traditional practice… Although the album is pure balladry, unfolding with exquisite patience, each song contains nifty little flourishes or instrumental elements that set them apart, such as the slide guitar and wheezy bass harmonica on For the Ear That is No More, or the slow peal of trumpet on Death and the Lady, courtesy of Rasten’s partner in Pip and Oker, Torstein Lavik Larsen. (Peter Margasak, Nowhere Street).
‘All done with such grace and elegance, without a note wasted or any required. Wonderful… faultless and deeply considered’ (Glenn Kimpton, KLOF).
Three high English and Scottish ballads, and three original settings of European folk tales.
Matt gatefold cover; gloss spot varnish.
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Warm, hazy and enigmatic Laurel Canyon country-folk — her debut — with well-measured baroque-ish brass and woodwind arrangements, reverbed and layered voices.