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.
For those of you inclined otherwise on Record Store Day—or immune to its charms—we are happy to announce that we now have copies of our RSD 2016 exclusive release, the first-ever reissue of Mike Cooper and Derek Hall’s 1965 EP, for sale directly from our website. The EP is available as a limited-edition 45rpm vinyl 7”—featuring heavy-duty color jacket, restored original artwork, and notes—as well as (for the first time) digitally.
We’re thrilled to be releasing one of our favorite records of all time today, Terry Allen’s 1975 masterpiece Juarez. Happy release day, and a deep thank you, to Terry. In celebration, we’re proud to present the Terry Allen Tamale T-Shirt—as far as we know the only item of its kind—as well as a sale on some older reissues.
In advance of its release on Friday, May 20, Rolling Stone Country is streaming the entirety of Terry Allen’s 1975 debut masterpiece in all its remastered glory, along with an accompanying feature. The Quietus goes deep on the accompanying, little-seen suite of related lithographs. And Terry presents the MemWars performance at SITE Santa Fe this week.
Texas Monthly has shared a new video of Allen and his sons Bukka and Bale performing “What of Alicia,” one of the narrative hinges of the Juarez cycle, earlier this year at Texas Tech University in Lubbock. TTU recently honored influential Lubbock natives Terry and his wife Jo Harvey with the inauguration of The Allen Collection, an extensive archive to house artwork and ephemera by both artists.
