Linda Ray

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Music

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2000

Latest Articles

Pinetop Seven

Bringing Home the Last Great Strike (Self Help/Truckstop)

By Linda Ray
Nov 9, 2000

There's an almost incomprehensible sweep in the desert landscape that awestruck newcomers often interpret with the word "majesty." To natives, it's often just "home," but it seems rare that anyone besides a native can locate that desert place of mind where the routine of seeing as much of the planet...
Waco Brothers

Electric Waco Chair (Bloodshot)

By Linda Ray
Sep 28, 2000

With Electric Waco Chair, the bloodshot, burly bunch from punk country has muscled its manly rage to a mature sound. And the sound is great. Chair is the most consistent of the band's five full-length releases, proving that edgy aggressiveness can be even more effective when it's hardly sloppy at...
Folk Implosion

Billy Bragg and Wilco continue to decipher the mystery and misunderstood legend of Woody Guthrie with the second installment of Mermaid Avenue

By Linda Ray
Aug 24, 2000

The deal with the Mermaid Avenue recording sessions was, if you wrote the music, you got to sing the song. So Nora Guthrie was a bit perplexed to find Wilco had recorded a Billy Bragg number, set to her father Woody's lyric, "Joe DiMaggio." As Bragg tells it, she confronted...
Various artists

Down to the Promised Land: 5 Years of Bloodshot Records (Bloodshot)

By Linda Ray
Jul 27, 2000

Down to the Promised Land is a kick in the pants for music fans, a thumb in the eye of naysayers and a great big moonin' the board rooms of the music industry establishment, which has repeatedly rent itself asunder in the last half-decade, while the Bloodshot insurgents firmly planted...
Family Values

The Handsome Family's Brett and Rennie Sparks give up their songs of personal alienation for something more universal

By Linda Ray
Jun 22, 2000

The Handsome Family's Rennie Sparks has something to tell her fellow Americans. "I'm not weird!" she exclaims. "You only think I'm weird because you don't want to admit you feel the same fucking way." Europeans, by contrast, seem to understand the dark muse of this Chicago husband-and-wife goth-country duo a...

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