MUSIC

A companion to 2016's private country rock overview Cosmic American Music, this second volume goes way past Gram Parsons' “country-rock plastic dry-fuck” and explores the twangy falsettos and commercial curiosity that sent the Eagles soaring. Though rooted in the west coast folk rock of the late-’60s, these new kids in town rendered a safe-for-the-suburbs sound bleached of the hippie era's political strife. 20 tracks, two LPs, and gatefold tip-on sleeve for easy seed and stem separating are included.

A ’70s homemaker stuck between the studio and a getting dinner on the table, Joyce Street eked out an arresting countrypolitan discography in the margins of an otherwise traditional American life. With lyrics drawn from the pages of her diary, Street’s stirring Mississippi warble led her into the fly-by-night world of custom studios, cutting tracks for upstart country concerns like Reena, Sonobeat, Revelation, and Arc. Channeling the honky tonk angel energy of Bobbie Gentry, Lorretta Lynn, and Jeannie C. Riley, Tied Down compiles a decade’s worth of melodies disguised as lottery tickets.

Sometimes, Mitski says, it feels like life would be easier without hope, or a soul, or love. But when she closes her eyes and thinks about what’s truly hers, what can’t be repossessed or demolished, she sees love. “The best thing I ever did in my life was to love people,” Mitski says. “I wish I could leave behind all the love I have, after I die, so that I can shine all this goodness, all this good love that I’ve created onto other people.” She hopes her newest album, The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We, will continue to shine that love long after she’s gone. Listening to it, that’s precisely how it feels: like a love that’s haunting the land. Love is always radical, which means that it always disrupts, which means that it always takes work to receive it. This land, which already feels inhospitable to so many of its inhabitants, is about to feel hopelessly torn and tossed again – at times, devoid of love. This album offers the anodyne. “This is my most American album,” Mitski says about her seventh record, and the music feels like a profound act of witnessing this country, in all of its private sorrows and painful contradictions. But “maybe it’s beyond witnessing,” she says. At times, it feels like the album is an exercise in negative capability – a fearless embodiment and absorption of the pain of other bodies. When I ask her what the album would look like, if it were a person, she says it would be someone middle-aged and exhausted, perhaps someone having a midlife crisis. But through the daily indignity and exhaustion, something enormous and ecstatic is calling out. In this album, which is sonically Mitski’s most expansive, epic, and wise, the songs seem to be introducing wounds and then actively healing them. Here, love is time-traveling to bless our tender days, like the light from a distant star. Mitski wrote these songs in little bursts over the past few years, and they feel informed by moments of noticing – noticing a sound that’s out of place, a building that groans in decay, an opinion that splits a room, a feeling that can’t be contained in a body. It was recorded at both the Bomb Shelter in East Nashville and the Sunset Sound Studios in Los Angeles. The album incorporates an orchestra arranged and conducted by Drew Erickson, as well as a full choir of 17 people - 12 in LA and 5 in Nashville - arranged by Mitski. And for the first time, it felt important to Mitski to have a band recording live together in the studio, to create this new sublime sound. Working with her longtime producer Patrick Hyland, the album has a wide-range of references, from Ennio Morricone’s bombastic Spaghetti Western scores to Carter Burwell’s tundra-filling Fargo soundtrack, from the breathy intimacy of Arthur Russell to the strident aliveness of Scott Walker or Igor Stravinsky, from the jubilation of Caetano Veloso to the twangy longing of Faron Young. From the first track, the album introduces and then heals a wound. “Bug Like an Angel” finds the divine in the ordinary, in the boozy drowning of sorrow. The narrator sings from the strange comfort of rock bottom: “sometimes a drink feels like family.” And suddenly, that choir of angels sings: “FAMILY!” This first track introduces a cosmic paradox: “The wrath of the devil was also given him by God.” This is an album in which dark and light exist in the same gesture, the same broken prayer. Like the Buddha inviting the demon Mara in for tea, The Land embraces brutal, daily pain — the necessary toll of transcendent love. In “Buffalo Replaced,” the wail of a freight train replaces the vibrations of the long-gone stampeding buffalo. Here, hope itself is personified, anthropomorphized into a sleeping creature, and our narrator wonders if life would be easier without her. But then, as though in response, “Heaven” offers a beautiful moment of passion, preserved like a fossil in time even though the “dark awaits us all around the corner.” This oasis is aggressively interrupted by “I Don’t Like My Mind,” a song from the perspective of someone in extraordinary pain. They are begging to keep their job, while actively keeping terrible traumatic memories at bay. Without their employment, these memories might take over, consuming them as relentlessly as the cake that they ate one “inconvenient Christmas.” The toggling between hope and despair in these four songs is masterful — the good, the bad, and the ugly in America’s backyard. This mythology continues to deepen with the stunning “The Deal,” in which someone is so burdened by their soul that they beg for it to be taken from them. Soon, the singer’s soul is revealed to be a bird perched on a streetlight. In a coup of songwriting, the narration does not switch into the newly-souled bird’s voice. No, we stay with the soulless “I.” The bird calls down: “You’re a cage without me. / Your pain is eased but you’ll never be free.” This song reinforces the album’s tug-of-war between the intoxication of love and the pain of isolation. Close on its heels is “My Love Mine All Mine,” an instant classic and the beating heart of the album, wherein the singer imagines their love shining down on the earth from the moon, long after the speaker is gone. “It’s just witness-less me,” she sings on “The Frost,” which suddenly takes us from the anticipation of loss right into the aching loneliness of it. On the subject of witnessing, Mitski says: “I’ve always been the person on the outside watching. And I’ve also done that with myself... outside of myself, witnessing myself, watching myself.” She thinks that she might have adopted this habit as a condition of being a woman of color, and that it’s led to the occasional post-apocalyptic fantasy of being the only person left in the world. We talked about Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, in which a man is profoundly alone, with only an archive of old tapes to keep him company. He remembers the seismic event of an old sexual encounter, but now it’s: “Past midnight. Never knew such silence. The earth might be uninhabited.” The Land repeatedly offers that same hypothesis. Without love, is there anyone here? After the alien lift of “Star” comes the album’s showdown. “I’m Your Man” feels as inevitable, bloody, and haunting as a Sergio Leone duel scene. The “Man” in the title isn’t some fella proclaiming devotion, Mitski says, but rather the man inside her head, the haunting patriarch who treats her like a dog and can destroy her at whim. Despite his confidence and swagger, he is tracked down by a pack of hounds — who have unionized in the name of catharsis. After this violent reckoning, a Fowler’s Toad calls out in what sounds like a human scream. The night settles into silence. The earth might be uninhabited. We glide into the liberating closer, “I Love Me After You,” in which someone is truly alone but truly free. King of all the land. “I don’t have a self,” Mitski observes. “I have a million selves, and they’re all me, and I inhabit them, and they all live inside me.” Loving all of these selves does not yield the easy burst of a pop song. It’s the “long, complex, deep love, that you can never get to the end of, that’s always evolving, like a person. And there’s just no end to it. It feels like space travel.” The album is full of the ache of the grown- up, seemingly mundane heartbreaks and joys that are often unsung but feel enormous. It’s a tiny epic. From the bottom of a glass, to a driveway slushy with memory and snow, to a freight train barreling through the Midwest, and all the way to the moon, it feels like everything, and everyone, is crying out, screaming in pain, arching towards love. Maybe this is what our best artists do: take a spaceship into the furthest reaches of pain, in order to bring back the elixir that we already had inside us. The unknowable known of love. “You have to go to both worlds all the time,” Mitski says, by which she means the mysterious world of making and the brutal world of living. This album is an act of hyperlocal space travel. Love is that inhospitable land, beckoning us and then rejecting us. To love this place — this earth, this America, this body — takes active work. It might be impossible. The best things are.

This is a work released in 2008 by Dragging an Ox through Water, a solo project by Portland-born musician Brian Mumford, and was later released on CD by Yellow Swans' Pete Swanson's label Freedom To Spend and the famous Japanese indie label Sweet Dreams Press! It's a masterpiece of deviant, underground country music, filled with a penchant for industrial, noise, and punk, and exuding an outsider atmosphere throughout!

“Rocky Top Ballads” is the debut album of Copenhagen singer/songwriter and producer Fine. Woven around Fine's voice, with guitars, drums, samples, and synthesisers, the album visits both country and folk moods but with an underlying electronic world counter weighing. Recorded, produced, and mixed by Fine.

Exploring late-night, after-hours meditations on sound; ‘Everything Above The Sky (Astral Travelling with Luke Una)’ is a new compilation by the titular DJ, promoter and enigmatic cultural curator. Off the back of the E Soul Cultura phenomena, this compilation comes at a timely point in Luke’s rich career as he soars the heights of playing all over the world. Avoiding any chance of his sound being pigeonholed, Luke has put together a tracklist of songs and music that have a transcendental feel, after coming off the grid, going back to source, outside the city walls . Music has long been believed to aid out of body experiences and many of us have searched long and hard for a combination of those elusive ingredients that might alleviate some of the monotony of everyday life, our daily routines and obligations, and those things that seem to block us from the spirit of the universe. In this collection, Luke selects music with all the right ingredients in just the right quantities, allowing the listener to engage in an esoteric journey of enlightenment through sound. Being a prolific collector of music, Luke initially delivered enough tracks to compile several compilations, making the licensing process the biggest effort to date for the label. The music moves softly and slowly, never becoming too intrusive, exemplifying the wonderful elevating properties of simple songs played from the heart. Luke’s Everything Above The Sky manifesto reads, “Astral Travelling in the meadowlands with acid folk, spiritual jazz, around midnight hocus pocus, cosmic psychedelic soul, magical spellbound whirling swirling love songs, Brazilian ballads of light into machine soul gospel utopia dreaming, Balearic bossa, Outer Space ancient African drum, the breath of trees, escaping the big bad modern world, gathering round winter fires, walking amongst the bracken in Padley Gorge in late summer twilight, overlooking the Hope Valley, escaping ego, detaching and finally letting go amongst the stars with the slowly floating people. It’s beautiful beyond. Everything above the Sky”. Beginning his career as an original Sheffield house young blood in the mid 1980s, Luke’s move to Manchester and partnership with Justin Crawford saw the birth of Electric Chair, a cornerstone cult night in the UK underground club scene. Then came Electric Elephant, a Croatian festival paying homage to their wild eclecticism from Balearic to Brazilian to É Soul, house, disco and techno. Luke’s much loved, long-running Homoelectric night and more recently Homobloc sell out festival for 10,000 souls has been at the forefront of Manchester’s LGBTQ+ cultural landscape. Luke’s Friday evening show on Worldwide FM captured imaginations and became a cult four-hour must-listen monthly journey for fans all over the world. Today, Luke remains, as ever, at the forefront of a changing milieu, pairing the momentous legacy of Manchester’s 80s and 90s scene with the delivery of what today’s club communities need to get down.

Aboriginal Australian blues, country, and gospel by the great Kankawa Nagarra, Queen of the Bandaral Ngadu Delta. These intimate recordings introduce the world outside Australia to Kankawa Nagarra, a beloved Walmatjarri Elder, teacher, human rights advocate, and environmental activist. Born in the traditional lands of the Gooniyandi and Walmatjarri peoples of North Western Australia, Kankawa grew up with the tribal songs at cultural ceremonies. When she was taken from her family to the mission, she was taught hymns and Gospel songs with the choir. On the pastoral lease where she was sent to work, Country music was everywhere. She first heard rock and roll on the station gramophone. But it wasn’t until many years later her musical journey truly began, when she stopped to listen to a busker outside a shop in Derby, Western Australia. It was the first time she’d heard the blues, and it awakened something in her. Through it, she found a medium to express all her thoughts and feelings, and it inspired her to turn these into songs. The empathy of her message extends from those she sees struggling around her to the entire planet being ravaged for profit. These twelve tracks, recorded live near her home of Wangkatjungka, WA, offer a cross-section of Kankawa’s entire musical experience - shifting gracefully between musical styles, languages, and moods, backed by the buzz of night bugs and call of daytime birds. In turns humorous, warm, and real about the hardships of life and the pillage of the land she holds dear, the record is the closest thing you can get to spending time with the great Kankawa herself. We are extremely grateful to release this record alongside Flippin Yeah Records and in collaboration with Kankawa Nagarra. High-quality vinyl comes with a four-page booklet featuring translations, stories, and track notes by the artist.

The sophomore effort from Gray/Smith refines their petroleum-based, hard-lullaby sound with a decidedly dusty precision. To call this pair’s brand of country-rock détournement “cosmic” would be too breezy: L. Gray and Rob Smith prefer to stare into sunken depths, channeling their recondite affections for lay-by mauve zones and red-dirt guitar wanderings. Formed in the outer-edges of Kings and Richmond counties circa 2020, Gray/Smith is something of an East-Coast involution. L. Gray (guitar and vocals) and Rob Smith (drums, guitar and vocals) are both trusty veterans of “band’s bands” like Pigeons (Soft Abuse), No-Neck Blues Band (Revenant, Locust), Rhyton (Thrill Jockey), and The Suntanama (Drag City), freewheeling groups known for mining from polyglot sources: rough-hewn folk and the spiritual avant-garde, bargain-bin hard rock and and collector’s-choice psychedelia alike. On their first, self-released LP Gray/Smith, serendipitously recorded at Gary’s Electric at the top of 2021, the pair trained their assured chops onto the great American song-form, honing a murky but tight approach that variously cribs “urban cowboy” and finger-picked primitivism. A string of cryptic appearances soon followed, including a short-lived residency at a now-shuttered vodka dive; a micro-tour with Coloradan songstress Josephine Foster; and a series of backyard and barroom gigs sharing stages with compatriots like Stella Kola, Blues Ambush, Samara Lubelski, and Wednesday Knudsen. Heels in the Aisle is the slipshod, burnt-out, mid-’70s unter-prog comedown to their debut’s backwoods, bushy-tailed, early-’70s, country-rock meanderings—expect more unrestrained riffs, artful studio wizardry, and worn-down introspection. Joining the ranks of bloodshot-eyed, blues-rock medleys à la Canned Heat’s “Parthenogenesis” and Grand Funk’s “Into The Sun,” “The SDSPS” is the nearly side-length opening cut, an expanded song-cycle condensing and riffing on the themes of their debut. “Help Me” ventriloquizes Pomona College outlaw Kris Kristofferson’s slow-roaring ballad of libidinal woe. On the flip side, “Verrazano Tile” and the title track pay heed to lower bays of Staten Island, while their arrangement of the traditional Zimbabwean tune “Guabi Guabi” is a bright Dead/Feat-like jaunt with blissed-out wah-wah pay-off. “Gaslight Boulevard” is lean, mean, and eight-beers-in space rock, and the closing track “Kekule’s Ring” is a slack-jawed, wistful crash back down to earth. All this, packaged in a luxe, expertly-printed sleeve photographed by downtown artist Lary 7 and designed by Eric Wrenn (Sophie’s Oil of Every Pearl's Un-Insides). For fans of Meat Puppets, Ronnie Milsap, Traffic’s John Barleycorn Must Die, the oceanic ebullience of the sacred, and the salty tang of the profane.

Insignificance consists of rock plus multiple musical allusions, layers of discreet noises, great playing from all the players and, to top it off, funny pop tunes laced with lyrical arsenic. As the moving finger of O'Rourke points (and clicks...just kidding! Insignificance is an all-analog affair), moments will come and go -- to remind you of other moments. Moments will arrive that have no precedent. And different, conflicting emotions will flash within you. He'll have total control of you, the helpless listener.

Across the last 15 years, Ryan Gustafson of The Dead Tongues has emerged as one of modern folk’s most distinct voices. As idiosyncratic and spectral as the songs have sometimes been, Gustafson has always tied his visions and verses to the kinds of hooks you tuck away like talismans, pulled out in case of emergency. Dust, Unsung Passage, Desert: The Dead Tongues’ albums remain some of the more compelling and curious works in their field on this side of a century. The latest edition to The Dead Tongues’ catalog, the song-centric and magnetic Body of Light and the discursive and wonderfully elliptical I Am a Cloud, is 16 complete tunes split across interweaving and disparate albums. Before heading to Betty’s, Gustafson spent a month at “the Shack,” a primitive and private structure in rural western North Carolina, working on new material and sorting through piles of poems, sticky notes scattered across the windows, and stacks of free writing streams of thought. Most of the songs were written during this time – the exquisite “Daylily,” a warm little gift for his partner, or “I’m a Cloud Now,” a fever dream of song and spoken-word about the toggle between identity and ephemerality. The creative energy was free flowing, deep and explorative, songs somehow coming together in a manner both freakishly fast and patient. In this energy and specific space the groundwork for the album was rooted, springing forth from the thick of the elemental and natural beauty these songs reference. The daylily on the cover of the album was picked from the land the shack is built upon - there’s a connection between the physical natural setting and the creative work itself, intertwined and natural bloom. Gustafson wanted to continue with that explorative energy once he got into the formal studio, allowing it to lead the group of players assembled – the albums feature performances by Jenn Wasner (Wye Oak, Bon Iver), Mat Davidson (Twain), Matt Douglas (The Mountain Goats), Joe Westerlund (Califone, Megafaun), Jeff Ratner (Bing and Ruth), and more. Gustafson wanted to dedicate the studio time to not just recording songs but also making something new, with new improvisations. The results feel at once casual and tremendous, the camaraderie and conversation between the players resulting in pieces that are lived-in but new. “Baby there ain’t no rules here/We can just slide,” Gustafson sings at the start of Body of Light’s opening title track, establishing a collective credo inside this gorgeous anthem about finding sanctuary with someone else. Notice how it seems to nod to flamenco before lifting into electronic abstraction, or how Wasner’s harmonies summon the deepest Southern soul over electric phosphorescence. And then there’s “Dirt for a Dying Sun,” where freight-train harmonica and spectral guitar frame a romantic dust-to-dust realism, where the best we can do is live wildly before we die. The characters on Body of Light are restless, damaged, and beautiful, whether clinging to an underground amid gentrification’s high rises during “Wolves” or holding on to the most intoxicating wisps of love during “Moon Shadow.” The band plays as if they’re just meeting these people for the first time, responding with an admixture of recognition and astonishment. The collected crew takes that approach to the next plane on I Am a Cloud, an intersection of Gustafson’s tone poems and top-tier improvisation. “Formations” is an exquisite instrumental, a soul-jazz dream of horns and bells, bejeweled drones and broken rhythms. Remembering the birthday night he spent alone on an Irish cliff as the Summer solstice neared several years ago, Gustafson narrates “A Bridge” as if he’s peering into his own mind with wonder and surprise. The finale, “Even Here, Even Now,” is a spiral galaxy, with the songs of crickets, the hums of a Shruti box, and the touch of percussion lifting Gustafson’s mantric statement of purpose—to keep moving, to keep singing, no matter what may come. It is a wondrous piece of devotional music that seems to praise sound itself—the gift that can open us up, when we’re no longer sure that can even happen anymore. “Sometimes it’s hard to be anyone anywhere it seems,” Gustafson, his voice as understanding as empathy, sings to start the second verse of “Hard Times, Sore Eyes,” the farewell for Body of Light. That may read like a bummer, a concise and crippling encapsulation of our struggles to make meaning that’s as right as rain. But, really, it’s a permission slip to elide expectation, to try something different. Maybe in the past, Gustafson was seen as the singer-songwriter in a folk-rock band called The Dead Tongues. But when he started to let that go, he found something fascinating, new, and absorbing. Body of Light and I Am A Cloud are brilliant chapters written after Gustafson wondered if he’d closed the book, and they are, in turn, hard to put down.

Arriving as the hippy movement was discovering its peaceful easy '70s feelings, Sandy Harless' Songs LP is Chillicothe, Ohio's lone contribution to the Cosmic American Music movement. Financed from a 27-aquarium fish breeding business, the album shows its Appalachian roots with a tight weave of mountain folk, rural rock, and pastoral country. Real people music.

Queer country rock from south of the Mason-Dixon line. High school folkie Charles Brown teamed up with regional rural rock rascals Sleepy Creek, triggering an unrequited inter-band love story and this album's melancholy title track. This 15-song LP gathers Brown's solo and band work from 1976-'82, and Jon Freeman's accompanying essay dissects the origin story of this private press pioneer.

絵葉書のようなジャケット・アートに惑わされてはいけません！70年代半ばのレコード売り場に並んでいたメジャー・レーベルのカントリー・ロック・アルバムの中でも、頭ひとつ抜けた知られざる名作であるJimmy Carterの77年のアルバム『Summer Brings The Sunshine』が〈Numero Group〉からアナログ再発。ナッシュビルやロサンゼルスから送り出される何百、何千もの洗練されたプロダクションを横目にミズーリ州の田舎で農夫やセミプロたちと共に77年に録音した作品。味わい深い女性のバッキング・ヴォーカル、物憂げなペダル・スティール、気迫のこもったギター・リックなど、コズミック・アメリカン・ミュージックの高貴でピークに近いスライスに溢れています。

Between 1993 and 2001 the trio released two LPs and an EP on Vernon Yard—a Virgin subsidiary—and two LPs on Vapor, the L.A.-based label founded by Neil Young and manager Elliott Roberts. In that span, they were selected to tour with Oasis, Mazzy Star, The Verve, and Spiritualized. Against a rising tide of post-Nirvana grunge and slipshod indie rock, Acetone tapped into a timeless Southern California groove by fusing elements of psychedelia, surf, and country.

Michael Nau is set to release his fifth full length record under Karma Chief Records on 12/8/2023. Since the mid 2000’s, he’s crafted a catalog of thoughtful, reflective songs as the frontman of indie-rock mainstays Cotton Jones, Page France, and Michael Nau & The Mighty Thread. All 11 tracks come together to paint a beautiful picture. The lyrics invoke the listener’s imagination throughout. They’re introspective, but vague and open-ended. The indie rock backdrop shows signs of psych-soul influence with dry and punchy drums, lush synth lines, and tastefully verb-soaked vocal production. Sweeping string arrangements and French horn runs add cinematic motion to the waltz-y “Shiftshaping” (track 4). Slide guitar and a shuffling snare drum add some get-up-and-go to “Painting a Wall” (track 2). Nau’s vocal delivery falls somewhere between crooning to a crowd, telling stories to a loved one, and musing to himself. The singer-songwriter’s relaxed attitude toward making records is discernible in the sound. A while back, veteran producer and engineer Adrien Olsen (The Killers, Lucy Dacus, Fruit Bats), approached him about recording in his Richmond, Virginia-based studio. For the first time in a while, Michael had some sessions on the calendar. He called a few old friends and put together a band. “I didn’t have much of a plan before Adrien reached out, so I wrote some songs specifically for the session,” Michael explained. “I was thinking about what would be fun to play with this specific group of guys." The band consisted of several long-time collaborators and musicians who had participated in Nau’s various recording and touring efforts over the years. “It had been a while since I’d made music in a room with other people,” Michael shared. “We just sort of started playing and didn’t really talk about what was happening.” The combo’s newfound chemistry was a primary source of inspiration and, with the help of Olsen, ultimately led to an album’s-worth of music. Nau and the band spent five days at Montrose Recording and left with a plan to return and finish up a few months later. “After the first session, I took a copy of the recordings with me to overdub a few things at my spot,” Michael shared. While he was working through it, he found a bunch of beautiful moments of jamming in between the takes. “I grabbed a bunch of the pieces and tried to work them in. Then, I dumped the whole thing onto a cassette as one long stream of songs.” With the record mostly complete, the final session at Montrose would consist of some simple overdubs and finishing touches. But somehow, in the months between, he lost the overdubs. “Going into the second session, all I had was the cassette,” Michael explained. The band got back together and performed another batch of songs. At the end of their second session, they had enough music to pick and choose from for the new full-length. “The songs, as they appear on the album, are basically how they were recorded as a live band.” Grab a copy of Accompany on 12/08/2023 and keep an eye out for tour dates in the coming months.

RODUCT DETAILS The previously unissued soundtrack to the 1964 noir, You’re Not From Around Here, discovered after 55 years in the Louis Wayne Moody archive. A hobo’s bindle full of twangy tremolo, reverb-drenched revenge, and existential echo. Songs of alienation, paranoia, dark alleys, betrayal, prison, prostitution, trains, gun play, feminine betrayal, and the dusty, lonely road of self discovery. A black and white affair trapped under the weight of a post-war technicolor allure, You’re Not From Around Here lives in a universe of moral ambiguity. Packaged in a replica of the original octagonal film canister, replete with rusted and glimmering varnishes alike, debossed logoture, and 36" x 27" fold out movie poster.

Propelled by his 1956 Lee Hazlewood-produced hit “The Fool,” Sanford Clark was already a rockabilly legend in his own right by the time he swapped his hair gel and switchblade for a pair of cowboy boots on They Call Me Country. Recorded between 1965-67 and originally released as a series of singles for Phoenix’s Ramco label, the 12 tracks on this LP borrow Bakersfield’s outlaw sound and ignore Nashville’s countrypolitan flair, standing as a true lost masterpiece of country music’s third generation. Clark’s booming baritone tells tales of bar fights, heartaches, and drinking til you can’t stand, while Waylon Jennings provides a backdrop of fuzzed out guitar twang. Mastered from the original session tapes and back on vinyl for the first time since the Nixon administration.

This is an official release from the prestigious [Mississippi Records] of a compiled compilation of material from the 70's by Abner Jay (1921 - 1993), an American multi-instrumentalist from Georgia and a lone one-man band and outsider bluesman. This is another solo band style, with one man playing drums, banjo, vocals and harmonica. The name of the song is "Cocaine," and it's a slow, country-style performance with a heavy dose of poison. His voice is very convincing, perhaps because of his checkered, haphazard, and reckless life. This is a bluesman!

The first volume in a survey of a form of Brazilian country music known as música caipira ("hillbilly music") - a stripped-back forerunner to música sertaneja, the Brazilian equivalent to US country & western which in it's contemporary form has come to dominate the domestic music industry in recent decades. This collection covers some of the earliest recordings made by the pioneering folklorist Cornélio Pires at the end of the 1920s, through to records from the 30s, 40s & 50s and the beginning of the 60s. Somewhat rooted in Portuguese troubadour folk traditions, música caipira is typically performed by a duo singing in parallel thirds and sixths, drawing upon a Portuguese-Brazilian style known as moda de viola - with the viola being the viola caipira, a Brazilian-style ten-string guitar that is the core instrument of the music. Born out of the "outback"-style region in north-eastern Brazil, these songs tell stories of pain, love, loss & betrayal - often backed by homemade guitars using invented tunings. Away from the polished pop country & western-stylings of the sertaneja, these recordings could be viewed as the Brazilian equivalent to the roots music of the American dustbowl or Appalachia.

Kevin Morby writes (and records, and imagines) at an almost incomparable clip, and his most recent album, This Is A Photograph, studies life, time and mortality through myriad lenses. It’s a dynamic, buoyant record on big, heavy themes, so it only makes sense that Morby found he wasn’t quite done with it on its completion. More Photographs (A Continuum) finds new nooks, corners and vantage points. “If This Is A Photograph is a house that you have been living inside of,” says Morby, “then More Photographs is, perhaps, the same home just experienced differently. As if you, its inhabitant, have taken a tab of something psychedelic and now, suddenly, you've replaced your eyeglasses with kaleidoscopes.” Here, Morby returns to his landmark album's bottomless themes with new wisdom, new imagination, and the winking, looping callbacks that tie his full body of work together in uniquely special ways. “Everything you once thought was familiar,” he continues, “suddenly appears differently, shifting shapes, color and sonic landscapes.” “Five Easy Pieces Revisited” captures the same moment from Bobby’s point of view; “This Is A Photograph II” takes a similar tack, revisiting its predecessor from a different angle. “Triumph” explores more of the myths and deaths that surround Memphis, TN, this time inspired by Big Star’s Chris Bell. And “Kingdom Of Hearts” arrives as an origin story to both This Is A Photograph and its new companion. “With every collection of songs,” says Morby, “I feel I must cast them out of me before moving onto the next project, and here I knew that what I had begun with This Is A Photograph was not finished. Releasing this collection is my tying a bow on that time and place in my creative life.” With a luxurious nine tracks – three re-imaginings and six brand new songs – More Photographs (A Continuum) is prequel, sequel and primer to an already rich and generous record from one of our most luminous modern songwriters.

激レア化している2018年作が初の再発。ノースカロライナ州アッシュビルを拠点に、フォーク、カントリー、ブルース、そして宇宙的なアメリカン・ロックを見事に溶け合わせるソングライター、Ryan Gustafsonの変名The Dead Tonguesによるアルバム『Unsung Passage』が〈Psychic Hotline〉よりヴァイナル・リイシュー。常に各地を飛び回ってきた冒険家であるグスタフソンが、歌うにふさわしいといえるほどに見てきたものを、その一人称で見つめ直した作品。慌ただしい現代に向けた内省的なアンセムに注ぎ込まれる秀逸な一枚。

Heavy Weight Vinyl. The unbelievably prolific Haruomi Hosono is one of the major architects of modern Japanese pop music. With his encyclopedic knowledge of music and boundless curiosity for new sounds, Hosono has put his unmistakable stamp on hundreds of recordings as a session player, producer, and auteur of his own idiosyncratic musical world. Born and raised in central Tokyo, his adolescent obsession with American pop culture informed his early forays into country music, which he would revisit later in his career. Hosono made his professional debut in 1969 as a member of Apryl Fool, whose heavy psychedelia was somewhat at odds with his influences, which leaned towards the rootsy sounds of Moby Grape and Buffalo Springfield. The latter was one of the main inspirations for his next group, Happy End, whose unique blend of West Coast sounds with Japanese lyrics proved to be highly influential over the course of three albums.

After Happy End’s amicable break up in 1973, Hosono released Hosono House, an intimate slice of Japanese Americana recorded at home with a back-to-basics approach akin to Music from Big Pink or McCartney. While his former band helped pave the way for the rise of “city pop” that reflected upon urban themes and city life, Hosono took a 180 degree turn towards the countryside for his highly-regarded first solo album. Located an hour from Tokyo in Sayama, Saitama Prefecture, the actual Hosono House was one of several American-style houses originally built for the families of troops stationed at the nearby Johnson Air Base, active during the post-war occupation years. By the early ‘70s this small community had become a hub for creative types looking for a break from Tokyo’s hustle and bustle – and cheaper rent. For Hosono, this was as close as he could get to living in America without leaving his home country. With rooms filled to the edges with recording gear, the house became a live-in studio for Hosono and his crack band – soon to become known as the in-demand session group Tin Pan Alley. The songs on Hosono House display the breadth of Hosono’s talents, from the hushed acoustic folk of “Rock-A-Bye My Baby” and the country twang of “Boku Wa Chotto” to the New Orleans funk of “Fuyu Koe” and the unexpected breakbeats in “Bara To Yajuu.” Lauded by artists such as Jim O’Rourke and Devendra Banhart, Hosono House remains a touchstone of the early phase of Hosono’s career.

Hosono’s solo career would take many twists and turns from this point forward, with forays into exotica, electronic, ambient, and techno, culminating in the massive success of techno pop group Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO), who made their debut in 1978. Admired by artists ranging from Van Dyke Parks to Mac DeMarco, Hosono continues to forge ahead as he heads into his fifth decade as a musician. With the re-release of his key albums for the first time outside of Japan, his genius will be discovered by a whole new generation of fans around the world.

Sometimes, Mitski says, it feels like life would be easier without hope, or a soul, or love. But when she closes her eyes and thinks about what’s truly hers, what can’t be repossessed or demolished, she sees love. “The best thing I ever did in my life was to love people,” Mitski says. “I wish I could leave behind all the love I have, after I die, so that I can shine all this goodness, all this good love that I’ve created onto other people.” She hopes her newest album, The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We, will continue to shine that love long after she’s gone. Listening to it, that’s precisely how it feels: like a love that’s haunting the land. Love is always radical, which means that it always disrupts, which means that it always takes work to receive it. This land, which already feels inhospitable to so many of its inhabitants, is about to feel hopelessly torn and tossed again – at times, devoid of love. This album offers the anodyne. “This is my most American album,” Mitski says about her seventh record, and the music feels like a profound act of witnessing this country, in all of its private sorrows and painful contradictions. But “maybe it’s beyond witnessing,” she says. At times, it feels like the album is an exercise in negative capability – a fearless embodiment and absorption of the pain of other bodies. When I ask her what the album would look like, if it were a person, she says it would be someone middle-aged and exhausted, perhaps someone having a midlife crisis. But through the daily indignity and exhaustion, something enormous and ecstatic is calling out. In this album, which is sonically Mitski’s most expansive, epic, and wise, the songs seem to be introducing wounds and then actively healing them. Here, love is time-traveling to bless our tender days, like the light from a distant star. Mitski wrote these songs in little bursts over the past few years, and they feel informed by moments of noticing – noticing a sound that’s out of place, a building that groans in decay, an opinion that splits a room, a feeling that can’t be contained in a body. It was recorded at both the Bomb Shelter in East Nashville and the Sunset Sound Studios in Los Angeles. The album incorporates an orchestra arranged and conducted by Drew Erickson, as well as a full choir of 17 people - 12 in LA and 5 in Nashville - arranged by Mitski. And for the first time, it felt important to Mitski to have a band recording live together in the studio, to create this new sublime sound. Working with her longtime producer Patrick Hyland, the album has a wide-range of references, from Ennio Morricone’s bombastic Spaghetti Western scores to Carter Burwell’s tundra-filling Fargo soundtrack, from the breathy intimacy of Arthur Russell to the strident aliveness of Scott Walker or Igor Stravinsky, from the jubilation of Caetano Veloso to the twangy longing of Faron Young. From the first track, the album introduces and then heals a wound. “Bug Like an Angel” finds the divine in the ordinary, in the boozy drowning of sorrow. The narrator sings from the strange comfort of rock bottom: “sometimes a drink feels like family.” And suddenly, that choir of angels sings: “FAMILY!” This first track introduces a cosmic paradox: “The wrath of the devil was also given him by God.” This is an album in which dark and light exist in the same gesture, the same broken prayer. Like the Buddha inviting the demon Mara in for tea, The Land embraces brutal, daily pain — the necessary toll of transcendent love. In “Buffalo Replaced,” the wail of a freight train replaces the vibrations of the long-gone stampeding buffalo. Here, hope itself is personified, anthropomorphized into a sleeping creature, and our narrator wonders if life would be easier without her. But then, as though in response, “Heaven” offers a beautiful moment of passion, preserved like a fossil in time even though the “dark awaits us all around the corner.” This oasis is aggressively interrupted by “I Don’t Like My Mind,” a song from the perspective of someone in extraordinary pain. They are begging to keep their job, while actively keeping terrible traumatic memories at bay. Without their employment, these memories might take over, consuming them as relentlessly as the cake that they ate one “inconvenient Christmas.” The toggling between hope and despair in these four songs is masterful — the good, the bad, and the ugly in America’s backyard. This mythology continues to deepen with the stunning “The Deal,” in which someone is so burdened by their soul that they beg for it to be taken from them. Soon, the singer’s soul is revealed to be a bird perched on a streetlight. In a coup of songwriting, the narration does not switch into the newly-souled bird’s voice. No, we stay with the soulless “I.” The bird calls down: “You’re a cage without me. / Your pain is eased but you’ll never be free.” This song reinforces the album’s tug-of-war between the intoxication of love and the pain of isolation. Close on its heels is “My Love Mine All Mine,” an instant classic and the beating heart of the album, wherein the singer imagines their love shining down on the earth from the moon, long after the speaker is gone. “It’s just witness-less me,” she sings on “The Frost,” which suddenly takes us from the anticipation of loss right into the aching loneliness of it. On the subject of witnessing, Mitski says: “I’ve always been the person on the outside watching. And I’ve also done that with myself... outside of myself, witnessing myself, watching myself.” She thinks that she might have adopted this habit as a condition of being a woman of color, and that it’s led to the occasional post-apocalyptic fantasy of being the only person left in the world. We talked about Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, in which a man is profoundly alone, with only an archive of old tapes to keep him company. He remembers the seismic event of an old sexual encounter, but now it’s: “Past midnight. Never knew such silence. The earth might be uninhabited.” The Land repeatedly offers that same hypothesis. Without love, is there anyone here? After the alien lift of “Star” comes the album’s showdown. “I’m Your Man” feels as inevitable, bloody, and haunting as a Sergio Leone duel scene. The “Man” in the title isn’t some fella proclaiming devotion, Mitski says, but rather the man inside her head, the haunting patriarch who treats her like a dog and can destroy her at whim. Despite his confidence and swagger, he is tracked down by a pack of hounds — who have unionized in the name of catharsis. After this violent reckoning, a Fowler’s Toad calls out in what sounds like a human scream. The night settles into silence. The earth might be uninhabited. We glide into the liberating closer, “I Love Me After You,” in which someone is truly alone but truly free. King of all the land. “I don’t have a self,” Mitski observes. “I have a million selves, and they’re all me, and I inhabit them, and they all live inside me.” Loving all of these selves does not yield the easy burst of a pop song. It’s the “long, complex, deep love, that you can never get to the end of, that’s always evolving, like a person. And there’s just no end to it. It feels like space travel.” The album is full of the ache of the grown- up, seemingly mundane heartbreaks and joys that are often unsung but feel enormous. It’s a tiny epic. From the bottom of a glass, to a driveway slushy with memory and snow, to a freight train barreling through the Midwest, and all the way to the moon, it feels like everything, and everyone, is crying out, screaming in pain, arching towards love. Maybe this is what our best artists do: take a spaceship into the furthest reaches of pain, in order to bring back the elixir that we already had inside us. The unknowable known of love. “You have to go to both worlds all the time,” Mitski says, by which she means the mysterious world of making and the brutal world of living. This album is an act of hyperlocal space travel. Love is that inhospitable land, beckoning us and then rejecting us. To love this place — this earth, this America, this body — takes active work. It might be impossible. The best things are.

激レア化している2018年作が初の再発。ノースカロライナ州アッシュビルを拠点に、フォーク、カントリー、ブルース、そして宇宙的なアメリカン・ロックを見事に溶け合わせるソングライター、Ryan Gustafsonの変名The Dead Tonguesによるアルバム『Unsung Passage』が〈Psychic Hotline〉よりヴァイナル・リイシュー。常に各地を飛び回ってきた冒険家であるグスタフソンが、歌うにふさわしいといえるほどに見てきたものを、その一人称で見つめ直した作品。慌ただしい現代に向けた内省的なアンセムに注ぎ込まれる秀逸な一枚。