Photo by Paula Masters Travis Lydia Loveless is brash, crude, smart-mouthed, self-assured, confident, talented — everything I’d like to be, even though I think I have a decade on the cowpunk singer/songwriter to have gotten there. “Boy Crazy” is an anthem to everything that every woman thinks about her crushes, especially the inappropriate ones; it’s … Read more
Photo courtesy of Bloodshot Records You don’t get more beginning of the roots rock scene, the alt country genre, than this demo from SiC favorite the Bottle Rockets featuring Jeff Tweedy and Jay Farrar. It was released in combination with re-releases of long out of print first two records The Bottle Rockets and The Brooklyn … Read more
Photo courtesy of Bloodshot Records New Orleans singer/songwriter Luke Winslow-King is getting ready to drop his debut album with Bloodshot Records, and he lead off with this great track. Winslow-King’s whole album fuses a number of New Orleans musical traditions together, and this is a slight sounding song, with light guitars and distant drums and … Read more
i see me as i was, you as you were before the color began to bleed out of us What a track to kick off the new Ha Ha Tonka record. I mean, what a track. “Colorful Kids” sounds both like and unlike Missouri’s Ha Ha Tonka; it’s rife with Brett Anderson’s machine-gun mandolin lines, and … Read more
All photos by Agatha Donkar Last spring, SiC ran an interview with Scott and Grant Hutchison of Frightened Rabbit, about their family, their musical history, and playing with a sibling. This is a second in that series, with Chapel hill’s Dex and Sara Romweber of Dex Romweber Duo. Speakers In Code: You said you have … Read more
Photo by Nicole C Kibert so sing a song for the no-hit wonder though it isn’t one of his Cory Branan’s second LP for Bloodshot Records, The No-Hit Wonder, opens with a fuzz of guitars and the title track, a ballad for the musicians who never catch a break but keep at it anyway. It’s a … Read more
Luke Winslow-King’s The Coming Tide was a gorgeous and overlooked gem of a record, his first for Bloodshot Records, last year; if the first two tracks from his follow-up Everlasting Arms, due out 9/30, are any indication of the rest of the album, it’s going to be another gorgeous gem, and hopefully not quite as overlooked. … Read more
Photo courtesy of Bloodshot Records What ex-Cop Shoot Cop frontman Tod A does with Firewater shouldn’t work; no one should be able to merge field recordings of traditional Middle Eastern, Asian, and African music with fierce punk guitars and have the song work, let alone an entire album work. But that is, in fact, what … Read more
Mix the subtle, retro-soul swagger of Fine Young Cannibals’ “Good Thing” with Otis Redding’s guttural vocals, put it all together, and whaddya get? The new single from SIC faves, JC Brooks & the Uptown Sound, “Everything Will Be Fine.” The band caught fire after officially releasing its version of the Wilco mainstay, “I Am Trying … Read more