Audio By Carbonatix
By Noah W. Bailey
Picking the best folk and Americana records of the year isn’t nearly as hard as discarding those great records that just didn’t feel right stuck in the category.
Releases by Calexico and DeVotchKa felt far too worldly to pigeonhole as folk or country, for instance, while Blitzen Trapper’s fantastic Furr smells more like the Kinks than Neil Young. [Editor’s note: That’s why we put it on our indie-rock list.] We likewise discarded Shearwater’s near-masterpiece Rook, despite the fact that the album’s instrumentation includes both banjo and a hammered dulcimer. And while we certainly returned to releases by Bon Iver and Bowerbirds throughout the year, we actually heard both records last year, when they were first independently released.
After this arduous vetting process, these are the records that survived: ten releases that dabble equally in meat-and-potatoes alt-country, soft-focus ’70s pop folk, and the old, weird America of Greil Marcus.
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As a Zooey Deschanel character once put it, long before she ever met M. Ward: “Listen and light a candle, and your future will become clear.”
Bonnie Prince Billy
Lie Down in the Light
(Drag City)
Perhaps even besting his 1999 high-water mark I See a Darkness, Lie Down is surely the most diverse and listenable outing of Will Oldham’s lengthy career, with a sweet, playful side not often found on the Bonnie Prince’s earlier records. From the Dead-does-country of opener “Easy Does It” to the earth-shaking duets with Canadian Ashley Webber (sister of Black Mountain’s Amber Webber) on “So Everyone” and “You Want That Picture,” the album is proof positive that Oldham is only getting better with age.
