Kait Lawson

I've been kind of smitten, lately, with the debut album from Memphis songwriter Kait Lawson, Until We Drown. It's pretty straight-up alt-country, though supported by a very seasoned crew, and as this genre can be at its best, bracingly, unflinchingly honest and strong. Lawson's got a flute-y, gutty voice, a good bit more vibrato than, say, Neko Case, but not as much as Amber from Black Mountain, and she writes well across a range of country sub-genres, including this full-band honky tonk song, "Place in the Ground."



The album's has been out, in a very quiet way, since March 2013 on Madjack Records...shame it's been lost in the shuffle.

Ooga Boogas

Awesome new stuff from Australia which, in itself, makes this perfect for Friday.



Got a glass of cold white wine waiting for me and, jesus lord, do I need it.

have a nice weekend.

Morningbell

Rather enjoyed this mildly psychedelic, ever-so-slightly jammy sixth album from the Gainesville, Florida band Morningbell...what do you think? (Little bit of Flaming Lips in there?)



Off to yet another track meet, my fifth in the last eight days. Wheeeee! Good thing I'm not working (oh, crap, I'm working, too).

Ty Segall finally gets some sleep

So what do you do after the year of three original albums...one full band, one more or less just you, one with Tim Presley of White Fence? All supported with relentless touring, and those ridiculous press interviews.

Get some zzzzzs apparently. And also make a teaser for the upcoming Sleeper which sounds, on a very limited sample, to be trippier and more psychedelic than recent efforts and very, very fine.



Maybe he'll get something to eat after this. A salad perhaps.

Sam Amidon's Bright Sunny South

It's been a long time since I had a review up...this is a good one. It's from Brattleboro's own Sam Amidon.

SAM AMIDON – Bright Sunny South
Nonesuch

BY JENNIFER KELLY

“He’s Taken My Feet” is an old song, a hymn that has been sung in churches for 100 years, celebrating one of the humblest moments of the New Testament, when Jesus washes his disciples’ feet. It’s a homespun melody, ringed in by melancholy but buoyed by the hope of resurrection. Its simplicity, humility and certainty are as foreign to our age as hoop skirts and mutton chops, but when Sam Amidon strips it down, as he does in its ghostly opening, it seems perfectly modern. It is streamlined and unfussy, but like a Bauhaus building, rather than a Shaker box. Later on, a lovely trumpet solo (that’s Kenny Wheeler, a free jazz titan, who has played with Derek Bailey and Anthony Braxton) shades the tune further towards the modern day, and, near the track’s end, it twists suddenly into drum-pounding, guitar-distorting, improvisatory mayhem. It’s the kind of track that you could really only do if you were Sam Amidon, raised on the folk and shape-note-singing customs of rural Vermont and educated as a young man in the post-modern anti-traditions of free jazz.

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David Berkeley...oh, well, okay

I just took a bunch of new stuff off my iTunes because it was unbelievably boring and I couldn't picture listening to it again...but I kept David Berkeley's Fire in My Head in the new folder. I'm not sure it's great, but it's pretty good, kind of a wavery, warbly Americana folk solo thing with some pretty harmonies and nice banjo picking. I'm not pounding the table on this one, but at least it doesn't make me want to throw my iPod across the room, you know what I mean?



If any of you are actually excited about anything you're listening to, I'd love to hear about it.

Jon Hopkins

I'm not really an electronics type, but Jon Hopkins participated in one of my absolute favorite albums from a couple of years ago, a joint effort with King Creosote, where he surrounded the really gorgeous, fragile folk melodies of KC with oddly evocative bits of found and manufactured sound...Immunity Jon Hopkins latest solo album is a bit drier and more abstract (because, doh, it doesn't have King Creosote on it), but quite lovely in spots. Here's a video while I try to think of something intelligent to say about it for Blurt.



Sorry I've been so haphazard lately. My work has picked up a bit, and I'm in the middle of track meet frenzy (three meets this week, two next...good times).