Weekend Roundup
A brief foray into recent releases
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There has been a frankly startling quantity of great music coming out in the past couple of months. And I’ll be the first to say it: I have not been keeping up with it very well. There’s just too much! I’ve been listening to 2-6 new releases a week and I’m still hopelessly behind. Ah, well. The least I can do is share some of the highlights with y’all.
Nathan Salsburg - Psalms
Guitarist, Kentuckian, and Jewish fella Nathan Salsburg brings the Hebrew-language heat on Psalms. The album is notable for a number of reasons - it features a number of frequent collaborators like Joan Shelley and Will Oldham, it features the Folkways Archivist’s own voice for the first time, and it is, as you may have guessed, an album of biblical Psalms set to music and performed in Hebrew. Tanakh Rock, anyone?
Sturgill Simpson - The Ballad of Dood & Juanita
If you had told me a year ago that Sturgill Simpson would be releasing a Bluegrass Rock Opera Country-Western concept album about an old Cowboy named Dood, his dog Sam, his horse Shamrock, and their shared quest to rescue Dood’s wife Juanita, I would have told you…. well, actually, I probably would have believed you. That sounds exactly like something Sturgill Simpson would do. But I could have told you right then and there that it’d be great, and I would have been correct.
Marco Woolf - Francine, i
I was unfamiliar with Marco Woolf until I stumbled across this EP on Bandcamp, but on his second release, Francine, i, the Malawian-born and Nottingham-based singer-songwriter delivers a sweeping, fully fleshed out universe in 27 minutes. The album sounds cavernous and chaotic, like being stuck on a raft in the ocean in the middle of a monsoon, yet somehow loses nothing in its sense of either immediacy or intimacy. Hints of Herbie Hancock, John Coltrane, Nina Simone, and Tim Buckley speckle the record. “A Bridge too Far” sounds like “Linus and Lucy” from Mars. It’s fantastic. I love it.
Watchhouse (FKA Mandolin Orange) - Watchhouse
No matter my feelings on the name change (which are numerous and yet--unresolved… don’t ask), this has to be one of my favorite albums - quite likely my single favorite - this band has ever released. They benefit from the expansion in their production, not to mention the new sense of focus their songwriting has taken - most of these songs are pretty transparently about the (apparently) exciting-yet-baffling experience of becoming new parents. Watchhouse, if you’re curious, is Dad Rock.
Sierra Ferrell - Long Time Coming
On the spectrum of classic Country voices, Sierra Ferrell sits somewhere between Willie Nelson, Tammy Wynette, and Loretta Lynn. With the exception of its opening track, “The Sea,” which is an oddity at best and more realistically a certainty of a skip, every track on this album is a perfect transposition of past sounds onto present times. Let tears flow into beers, this is a great album.
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Some Thoughts on Solar Power
Lorde really fumbled this one, I’ll just say it. I tried with this album, and it has its highlights (“Fallen Fruit,” “The Man with the Axe”), but it’s just not worth the 43 minutes it runs. It plods along without much of a purpose and wallows in unambitious nostalgia. If I wanted to listen to Natalie Imbruglia I would - and trust me, I do.
A Haiku Review:
The Killers - Pressure Machine
Not so much Heartland
as it is Indie Butt Rock;
Bruce Springsteen cosplay.
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David Lefkowitz is a writer, musician, and former Latin NHS president. His work has been featured by Melted Magazine, Double Negative, and Vinyl Tap Magazine, among others.