Tuneful country-rock with influences of Dylan, Petty and Knight
If you charted the Texas trio Emory Quinn amid the circles of a Venn diagram, you’d find them at an intersection that neatly combines twang, beat and melody. For those who like their country to rock, and their rock to sparkle with catchy melodies, these ten original songs will have you humming along as you imagine yourself moving to the band’s guitar-bass-drums in a Texas dance hall. Clint (Quinn) Bracher sings with enough rootsy emotion to keep country radio at bay, but in a world where the Eagles and Wallflowers once had hit records (and numerous Nashville acts are only a pace or two away from rock), one can hope this sort of musical hybrid could again find a mainstream audience.
Bracher’s an ace wordsmith who employs a mix of detail and allusion, setting concrete moments amid more ephemeral thoughts. The group’s melodies are often misleadingly upbeat, hiding the dark murder and unhinged smile of “Holes Through the Windows” behind Byrds-like jangle and harmony. The banjo closer “Falling Down Again” is among the more chipper songs about detoxing you’re likely to hear, and though Dylan and Petty are obvious touchstones, there’s also the wariness and foreboding of Chris Knight in “Tear Down the Walls.” Bracher explores both sides of a vagabond’s life in a pair of songs; the rootless party times of “Moving On” offer contrast to the enduring loneliness of constant motion in “Finds Danger.”
Group harmonies are returning to country music, and they’re just as pleasing today as they were in the 1970s. You can feel the joy they bring to Stonehoney as they vocalize the wordless “oh-ahhh” exclamations on the opening track. They revel in the way their voices blend with one another’s, and then collectively with the songs’ emotion. It suggests what CS&N must have felt the night they first harmonized. What really makes this Austin quartet’s debut special is that it was recorded live, with no sweetening and no overdubs. The synergy of voices, instruments and songs honed on stage followed the group into the studio, giving these fourteen songs (culled from forty cut in two days!) a wonderfully organic feel. As vocalist/guitarist Nick Randolph writes on their website, “The band grew out of us just hanging out, and it still has that same feeling.”
All four members credit their vocals first, their instruments second, and they reconfigure the lead/harmony assignments from song to song. All four contribute original songs, as well, and the results lean on a variety of country, country-rock and southern-rock influences. The opening line of “I Don’t Want to Go Home” might fool you into thinking it’s sung by John Fogerty, but by the time the song gets to its cleverly crafted lyric “now that you’re gone, the house is like a heartache with a view,” the vocal blend has the richness of Alabama. The lead vocal of the road-warrior themed “White Knuckle Wind” has the earthy edge of Levon Helm, with twangy guitars and Earle Pool Ball’s piano adding honky-tonk sparks.
Vintage live document of West Coast country-rock pioneers
The West Coast country-rock band Poco was known early on for their live shows. Their third album, a live set titled Deliverin’, was recorded in late-1970 and cracked the Top 30 – something their two previous albums had failed to do. Epic set up a private showcase in Columbia’s Hollywood studio, having the band play in an intimate setting for an audience of label employees. With the group’s latest studio album, From the Inside, having just hit the streets, this set was a rally for the employees, a warm-up for supporting gigs, and an opportunity to lock down the set and solidify the latest band line-up. By this point, Jim Messina had been replaced by guitarist/singer Paul Cotton, joining another recent addition, Timothy B. Schmit, and founding members Richie Furay and Rusty Young.
Unlike the new material debuted on Deliverin’, this hour-long set cherry-picked material from all four of the band’s previous albums, with half drawn from their latest studio release. The medley of “Hard Luck,” “Child’s Claim to Fame,” and “Pickin’ Up the Pieces” had appeared on their previous live outing, and remains notable for the inclusion of Furray’s Buffalo Springfield-era “Child’s Claim to Fame.” The live arrangements were generally kept concise and tight, though they allowed themselves to jam a bit on “Hurry Up,” and the single “C’mon” is stretched to five minutes with a breakdown and guitar solo. They also slow down mid-set for a pair of acoustic tunes, “You Are the One” and “Bad Weather.”
This Los Angeles country-rock group’s anthology re-imagines Big Star’s hopeful album title #1 Record as a joshing (or perhaps wishful) look back through a catalog that wasn’t really likely to find broad commercial fortune. A decade in the making – the band formed in 2000 – the songs cherry-pick the group’s four previous releases, adding an early demo, two previously unreleased tracks, and three new recordings. The band’s combination of tight country harmonies, shuffling rhythms, road-inspired topics, and flights of fiction mark them as natural-born citizens of Gram Parson’s cosmic American music colony. Their music offers reverence for the twang upon which it’s built, but there’s also humor, tongue-in-cheek paranoia and a liberal hippie environmental ethos running through their songs.
Coming together at the tail end of the Clinton administration and flourishing artistically during eight years of Bush, the band’s songwriters found plenty of grist for the lyrical social mill. They sing the praises of “Byrd from West Virginia,” note his past membership in the Ku Klux Klan, and highlight his anti-war stance with a guitar, bass and mandolin waltz the fiddle-playing senior senator [12] would surely appreciate. There are songs of flower-child philosophy being passed to a new generation, pot farmers living off the gifts of “Humboldt,” meditative appreciations of the America’s open road beauty, sun-burnt runs through the desert, tears cried for the planet’s desecration (or as they label it “one sad valentine to Earth”), and ire leveled at capitalistic icons such as salesmen and self-help charlatans.
After the Beatle-esque pop of 2007’s The Minus 5, this Scott McCaughey-led collective returns with a new lineup and a twangier country-rock sound. McCaughey and companion Peter Buck are back, alongside Colin Meloy, additional members of the Decemberists and other guests. As on all of the collective’s albums, McCaughey’s vocals and songs provide the binding component, the latter of which include a healthy dose of downbeat, troubled and troubling themes. Pedal steel, banjo and general melancholy make a straightforward match to the lyrical tenor, with McCaughey sounding remarkably like Ray Davies in his mid-period Kinks prime – in both nasal vocal tone and social content.
The album opens with the bitter remains of a failed courtship and closes with the despondent misery of a troubled and broke bar fly. In between McCaughey offers the sort of opaque lyrics he’s written regularly for both the Minus Five and the Young Fresh Fellows. His titles and lyrics intimate deeper personal meanings, but they’re not always easily revealed. He resurfaces for a portrait of the working musician’s nightmare, “The Lurking Barrister,” he eyes unsparing isolation and social decay in “Big Beat Up Moon” and excoriates fundamentalism with “I Would Rather Sacrifice You.” The Kinks vibe is strong on “Vintage Violet,” with the She Bee Gees singing along as a girl-group Greek chorus.
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