We’re proud finally to announce the long-simmering details of our most in-depth and deluxe reissue project to date, Terry Allen’s revered art-country classic 1979 double album. Produced in close collaboration with the artist and remastered from the original analog tapes, this is the definitive edition and the first to correct the tape speed inconsistencies on all prior versions.
News about the release show for Nathan Bowles’ Whole & Cloven at the Center for the Study of the American South, as well as PoB artists at the Hopscotch Music Festival, the Southern Accent exhibition at the Nasher Museum of Art, and tour date updates from Hiss Golden Messenger, Itasca, Jake Xerxes Fussell, Nap Eyes, Promised Land Sound, Steve Gunn, and Terry Allen.
Allen’s deeply moving second masterpiece, a satirical memory palace to his West Texas hometown, is often cited as the urtext of alt-country. Produced in collaboration with the artist and remastered from the original tapes, this is the definitive edition: the first to correct the tape speed inconsistencies on all prior versions; the first U.S. vinyl reissue; the first CD to restore the full track listing; and the first to contextualize the record within Allen’s 50-year career.
Many thanks to Laura Snapes and The Guardian for this thoughtful piece on “Cosmic Americana,” which includes comments from, and about, PoB pals and collaborators like The Weather Station, Nathan Bowles, Steve Gunn, Hiss Golden Messenger, William Tyler, Chris Forsyth, Joan Shelley, Nathan Salsburg, Ryley Walker, and uh, us too. And of course, always, Jack Rose.
Mississippi buddies Jake Xerxes Fussell and William Tyler reunited on stage at Duke Gardens this week in the sweltering heat, each playing sets from their most recent solo albums and joining each other for Willy T’s “Highway Anxiety,” the traditional “Star Girl” (from Jake’s s/t album, produced by Willy), Nick Lowe’s “I Love the Sound of Breaking Glass,” and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s summertime classic “Fishin’ in the Dark.”
In this dark summer season of disharmony and violence, we can all use a few moments of serenity amid the storm. In recent months, Open to Chance, the beautiful new album by Itasca, has offered us respite and balm in the form of its quiet, cloudy idylls, and we hope it might do the same for you. Pre-orders include a 320k MP3 download of “Buddy,” which NPR Music’s Songs We Love premiered today. Plus, US and EU (with Ryley Walker) tour dates.
The music of L.A.-based guitarist, singer, and songwriter Kayla Cohen is mutable and multivalent, richly allusive of the hermetic worlds of private-press canyon-cult mystics and East Coast noiseniks alike. Her adept fingerstyle guitar work—nimble but unshowy, always at the service of framing her plaintively unspooling modal progressions and gorgeous, moonlit voice—centers these melancholy pastorales in a hazy, heat-mirage space equally suggestive of familiarity and distance, community and anomie. Itasca’s enchanting, acid folk-inflected PoB debut is also the first to feature a full band.
Brooklyn Vegan is premiering the hilarious new video for Nap Eyes’ “Click Clack” from Thought Rock Fish Scale, which features some Weird Science meets Paul McCarthy meets the Muppets meets Vincent Price vibes. Puppets enhanced by science! Catch the Polaris Music Prize-nominated band on tour with Guided by Voices, Steve Gunn, and Big Thief.
Now that the summer solstice is behind us, and we begin the slow slide to shorter days, it is high time to announce Whole & Cloven, the exquisite third solo album by Nathan Bowles (Steve Gunn, Pelt, Black Twig Pickers), now available to pre-order. Pre-orders include an immediate download of “Gadarene Fugue,” which the good people at NPR Music’s Songs We Love premiered today.
On his exquisite third solo album, Bowles again augments his mesmeric clawhammer banjo pieces with piano, percussion, and vocals. Whole & Cloven offers a stoic meditation on absence, loss, and fragmentation, populating those experiential gaps with stillness and wonder. Straddling Appalachian string band music and avant-garde composition, Nathan proves himself heir to deconstructivist tradition-bearers like Henry Flynt and Jack Rose.
