country

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Rock Bottom Rhapsody LP by Pokey LaFarge. Listening to Pokey LaFarge’s ninth album (first for New West Records, and first I had ever heard) had a very strange effect on me. I knew the sound had me interested right away but, before even the A-side if the album had played through, I had already picked up my laptop and found out everything I could about the band. I looked up all...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into Art Bergmann’s The Apostate LP. In Canada, there is simply no musician more criminally underrated and under-appreciated than Art Bergmann. Since first appearing on the Vancouver punk and indie rock scenes in the Eighties, Bergmann has regularly had to fight to get popular notice not because the guitarist needed time to mature artistically, but because he has always been in the wrong place at the wrong time; always on the cusp of...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Meet King Leg LP by King Leg. The beauty of working in a pop culture-identified medium like pop music is that, while the music does initially have finite appeal as ‘new music,’ the basic structures and forms can easily be revisited, re-purposed and re-presented as often as new artists are willing to rediscover them. Any music can be reborn with the power of belief Take King Leg’s new album, Meet King...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the TX Jelly LP by The Texas Gentlemen. It might not be so easy for readers to remember now, but TX Jelly – the debut LP by Texas Gentlemen – actually springs from a tradition which once favored allowing an album to build and develop organically as musicians made it in the studio. Back before punk rock and all its myriad sub- and side-genres instilled a sense of brevity, “get in, get...

Old 97’s Graveyard Whistling (ATO/Cadence) The Old 97’s have been touted as one of the alt-country greats for years now but, really, one of the things that has kept listeners coming back for a while now has been the band’s steadfast refusal to believe their own hype and just try to make an album which comes close to answering it. Now, at first, that modesty was cute (what music fan doesn’t like pulling for their heroes against the odds?), but...

Artist: Rascal Flatts Album: The Greatest Gift Of All Label: Big Machine Records/Sony Music What do people mean when they say “that music moved me”? Moved you from your seat to turn it up? Moved you from the room to get away from the twisted sounds of crashing and banging? Moved you to shake your bottom and get a groove on? For me, music is a background noise that is always on when I am working, cleaning, playing, cooking, bathing...