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.
Legendary Texan artist Terry Allen occupies a unique position straddling the frontiers of country music and visual art. Widely celebrated as a masterpiece—arguably the greatest concept album of all time—his spare, haunting 1975 debut LP Juarez is a violent, fractured tale of the chthonic American Southwest and borderlands. Produced in collaboration with the artist and meticulously remastered from the original analog tapes, this is the definitive edition of the art-country classic.
First-ever reissue of folk and experimental music icon Mike Cooper’s historic earliest recordings and PoB’s very first official Record Store Day exclusive release. Named for The Shades, the Reading, UK folk club where Mike Cooper regularly performed, and which housed prodigy Derek Hall—“a guitarist who could actually match Davey Graham both in technique and musical ideas”—this super rare EP was issued in 1965. (ON SALE)
Recorded live to tape, with no overdubs, on the North Shore of Nova Scotia, Nap Eyes’ quietly contemplative sophomore record refines and elaborates their debut, offering an airier, more spacious second chapter, a bracing blast of bright oceanic sunshine after the moonlit alleys of Whine of the Mystic. But the briny, cold Atlantic roils beneath these exquisite, literate guitar pop songs, posing riddles about friendship, faith, mortality, and self-doubt.
On their most refined and ruefully elegant album, Gun Outfit perfect their incandescent sonic signature: a dusky, canyon-cult blues fueled by melodic dual-guitar weaving and seductive male/female incantations at zero hour. It’s the nocturnal sound of desert-damaged L.A. burnout, a soured American surrealism in rock and roll creole: white line fever, paint fume flashbacks, a stranger wading out alone into the black surf. Feat. Henry Barnes of Man Is the Bastard/Amps for Christ.
Nashville’s finest purveyors of febrile root-work psychedelia return with a dizzyingly accomplished second album that highlights an expanded band; bigger, bolder arrangements featuring more and louder guitars, squally strings, and Steve Gunn; and road-ripened songwriting that veers between the frenetic and tender, recalling Jim Ford, the Pretty Things, the Grateful Dead, Dennis Linde, and the Byrds at their most eight-miles-fried.
The second album of astonishing duets by guitarists James Elkington (who has toured and/or recorded with Jeff Tweedy, Richard Thompson, and Steve Gunn, among others) and Nathan Salsburg (an accomplished soloist deemed by NPR “one of those names we’ll all associate with American folk guitar”) is a sublime suite of nimble, filigreed compositions by two singular stylists.
Nova Scotia’s Nap Eyes is the greatest band you’ve never heard, and Whine of the Mystic is their first full-length album, a brilliant small-batch brew of crooked, literate guitar pop refracted through the gray Halifax rain. Recorded live to tape with no overdubs, it’s equal parts shambling and sophisticated, with one eye on the dirt and one trained on the starry firmament, inhabiting a skewed world where odes to NASA and the Earth’s magnetic field coexist easily with songs about insomnia and drinking too much.
The third and finest album yet by Toronto artist Tamara Lindeman, recorded with Afie Jurvanen (Bahamas) and Robbie Lackritz (Feist), Loyalty crystallizes her lapidary songcraft into eleven emotionally charged vignettes and intimate portraits, redolent of fellow Canadians Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, and David Wiffen, as well as past collaborators Doug Paisley and Daniel Romano.
The first-ever reissue of the private-press country-rock rarity by Colorado auto body painter, Marine, and garage band lifer Kenny Knight—he played in the original `60s Black Flag—Crossroads recalls a homebrew American Beauty-era Grateful Dead in its world-weary, low-key mood and indelible songwriting. Faded, anxious, melancholy, and lovely, this out-of-time document belies its 1980 release date.
