Stripped Up Eternal Summers took advantage of the studio on the band’s new album. Preparing to record its fourth album, Eternal Summers settled on a goal of discovering and incorporating the sort of sounds the band had never put on an album before. “We just really wanted to explore the…
Austin’s James McMurtry writes songs with the richness of novels, his characters struggling through life’s trials in vignettes sculpted as vividly as the world in front of your eyes. At 53, the celebrated songwriter remarkably is turning better with age, with his latest record, Complicated Game, garnering some of the…
Cave Recordings Great Lake Swimmers sought out natural reverb in the wild. Great Lake Swimmers, the folk ensemble Tony Dekker began almost 15 years ago, found a niche in a calming, pastoral sound that perfectly framed songs inspired by the natural world. But when Dekker and his bandmates began working…
The Western motif that surrounded Lord Huron’s debut record, Lonesome Dreams, is gone, replaced by a collection of strange, mysterious characters who inhabit songs inspired by vintage pulp fiction. “Since the beginning, I conceived this new record as sort of an anthology of weird fiction, a collection of stories that kind…
Space Is Still the Place, the sophomore album from Austin psych-rockers Bright Light Social Hour, smashes past, present, and future together into a golden age of the band’s own design. From the lyrics to the sound, from the recording techniques to what the band drew as inspiration from meeting down-and-out…
After two records of inward-looking DIY folk-punk, Katie Crutchfield took a more observational route to her third Waxahatchee album. For her debut on Merge Records, Crutchfield shifted her songwriting toward the people around her and the world she saw touring the country. “Even the fact that the songs are observational…
Immediately after the debut album (Dead) from Scotland’s Young Fathers won the prestigious Mercury Prize, the group took off for Berlin to record a vastly different sophomore album. Blending hip-hop with a varied soundscape that brings in everything from drum ‘n’ bass to punk and psychedelic rock, Young Fathers began…
Raised on a farm in southern Ontario, Fred Eaglesmith has nevertheless found himself grouped in with the type of outsider Texas songwriters who came of age in the late ’70s and ’80s. Though it’s not a designation that comes with huge album sales, Eaglesmith says he’s proud to find his…
How much of a band’s music is determined by where and how it records? For Ted Joyner and Grant Widmer, who formed Generationals in 2008 and have released an album or EP each year since, their fourth album seemed to be the right time to leave behind a process that…
If it seems odd that a band named Modern Baseball lives in a house named Michael Jordan, well, that’s all just part of the fun. After all, it wasn’t as though this Philadelphia pop-punk quartet devised some master plan that would make them stars. From the start, Modern Baseball just…
Courtney Barnett tends to find her songs in places no one else is looking. The Melbourne, Australia, singer-songwriter collects subject matter like a curio shop, her words turning the inexplicable or the mundane into fully formed commentaries and poignant observations on some of life’s biggest questions. The plain, the everyday,…
Last time around, Foxygen proclaimed themselves “the 21st-century ambassadors of peace and magic.” The mischievous, fun-loving, experimental psych-rock band — formed and fronted by songwriting partners Jonathan Rado (guitar and keyboards) and Sam France (vocals) — sound well beyond the 22nd century on its new release …And Star Power…
Tim Showalter made his name as Strand of Oaks over three albums of dark folk music, a mysteriously enticing mix of dreamscape sci-fi lyrics and a simmering, powerful delivery. Unsatisfied, however, because of a key missing piece, Showalter turned everything upside down for Strand of Oaks’ fourth album, HEAL. “What…
As Josiah Johnson of Seattle’s folk-rock sextet the Head and the Heart describes it, the band has evolved from bright and sunny to darker and deeper. “The first record was very optimistic, ‘Follow your heart,’ and the second was ‘Even if you follow your heart, there are going to be…
The changes that mark the Hold Steady’s new album are many. Starting out its second decade, the band added a new lead guitarist in Steve Selvidge. Singer Craig Finn left behind many of his signature lyrical elements. The band recorded with a new producer, Nick Raskulinecz (Foo Fighters, Deftones) in…
Turn the question of what’s familiar around and it becomes an examination of what’s different. For The Antlers’ fifth album, Familiars, vocalist-guitarist Peter Silberman found himself writing in the middle ground, searching for what’s changed and what’s stayed the same in his own life – and in the band’s sound…
Sean Carey’s Range of Light begins like the still quiet of a forest morning. “Glass/Film,” the opening song of Carey’s second full-length album, comes with the distinct sense of an awakening, starting with a heart-beat drum and slowly building, a soft guitar, a flash of horn. Carey says the album…
Between The Mountain Goats that created early solo boom box recordings and the collaborative band that toured its 2012 album, Transcendental Youth, with a horn section were the duo years. And it’s as a duo that The Mountain Goats will perform at Crescent Ballroom on Wednesday, June 18…
Performing, writing, or even living, Greg Brown is at his best when he can settle into a groove. With 25 studio albums, the 64-year-old Brown has carved out a distinct path among folk singer-songwriters. His rich baritone, with a rounded, cozy Midwestern drawl, delivers songs with wry humor, existentially yearning…
Damien Jurado’s 2012 album Maraqopa — a dreamscape narrative that found the once-quiet singer-songwriter enmeshed in spacey psychedelic rock — is only half the story. After a stalled effort at a follow-up record, Jurado took the advice of a friend and revisited the album’s world — which came to him,…
Philadelphia’s The War on Drugs began as the home-studio project of Adam Granduciel – an unrepentant tinkerer and gearhead whose deeply layered songs put a new spin on classic rock. After the breakthrough success of the expertly crafted Slave Ambient, Granduciel’s project became more of a live band, a move…
When childhood friends Marcus Pepperell and John Hamson Jr. formed THUMPERS, they were in need of a musical escape. One dumped, the other fired from his previous band, the London-based duo started putting together songs in pieces, working toward a deeply layered indie-pop that fits somewhere between the Polyphonic Spree…
