A Gorgeous New Album from the Wailin’ Jennys’ Ruth Moody

Banjo player/songwriter Ruth Moody - one-third of perennially popular all-female Americana roots trio the Wailin’ Jennys - has just released a new album, These Wilder Things, her second as a bandleader. It’s excellent for so many reasons. First is David Travers-Smith’s purist but lush production: many of the songs follow a familiar trajectory from a skeletal intro and then bring in the instruments one by one until there’s a fullscale bluegrass orchestra motoring along. As one would expect from a member of the Wailin’ Jennys, the songwriting is strong – Tift Merritt comes to mind – and the playing is tremendous.

The opening cut, Trouble & Woe, a stark gospel-flavored minor-key banjo tune, is basically the Wailin’ Jennys since the whole band’s on it. As it picks up steam, the bandleader’s brother Richard Moody’s viola and Adrian Dolan’s fiddle join with Sam Howard’s bass, the viola firing off a nonchalantly searing solo as it winds out. One And Only, a gently swaying country song, blends delicious layers of slow-burning electric guitar from Adam Dobres, rising and falling around a tersely biting slide guitar solo.

Where so many others have failed, Moody pretty much succeeds at reinventing the old Springsteen radio hit Dancing in the Dark as sprightly seductive retro acoustic swing a la Lake Street Dive. The title track takes the volume down with Moody’s pensively airy vocals over hypnotic gospel-tinged piano: “We can’t be tamed, these wilder things,” she insists quietly. She keeps things hushed and ethereal with the brooding, restless Trees for Skies, while Mark Knopfler gives a clinic in terse multitracking on the even more brooding Pockets: “We took the roads most would avoid,” Moody asserts, unintimidated by anything that might imply.

The spare piano waltz Make a Change evocatively builds an evocative calm-before-the-storm ambience, pedal steel lingering in the background. One Light Shining blends Dolan’s mandolin with guest Jerry Douglas’ dobro, followed by the delicate, Celtic-flavored Life Is Long and then the quietly elegant, similarly low-key Nothing Without Love, a big anthem stripped to just the essentials. Moody will be on tour this summer; watch this space for possible NYC dates.

The Devil Makes Three Brings Their Kick-Ass Oldschool/Newschool Americana to the NY Area

Hilarious, high-energy grasscore/oldtimey band the Devil Makes Three are doing two (sort of) New York area shows. On April 17 at  8 PM they’ll be at the Ridgefield Playhouse, 80 E Ridge St. in Ridgefield, Connecticut, right on the Westchester border. On the 18th they’ll be at the Music Hall of Williamsburg at 10:30 PM. For their Brooklyn show, take advantage of $17.50 adv tix available at the Mercury Lounge box office, open M-F 5-7 PM.  As NY Music Daily’s sister blog Lucid Culture said recently, what this group does “isn’t  just bluegrass with funny, surreal lyrics – the band also plays country swing, blues and Nashville gothic and does that stuff period-perfect as well.”

Here’s the rest of their endorsement of the band’s amusingly eclectic album Do Wrong, Right:

“The album is sort of a cross between the Spankers and Mojo Nixon’s duo stuff with Jello Biafra. The opening track, All Hail is a genuine classic: as they see it, the world is populated with clueless shoppers all wasted on crack and antidepressants: ‘It ain’t a drug, goddamn it, I give it to my only son,’ says the guy on the way to the office thorazine party. The amusing intro of Poison Trees gives no indication of the ominous, apocalyptic shuffle that follows. The title track is a bouncy, violin-fueled bluegrass tune; they follow that with Gracefully Facedown, a woozy swing shuffle like early Dan Hicks. It’s a tribute to anyone who subscribes to the idea that ‘drinking bottom shelf bourbon seems to work all right til closing time.’ For Good Again cynically mythologizes the band’s roots living in squalor, paying the rent in illegal drugs and writing songs that someday they’d get paid to play. ‘Everybody who’s anybody at one time lived in somebody’s hallway,’ they assert, and they’re probably right.

Their Working Man’s Blues isn’t the Merle Haggard standard – it’s a haunting tobacco sharecropper’s lament with blues harp that sounds like it was recorded on another planet, a feeling echoed on a biting version of Statesboro Blues. The Johnson Family is an eerie, carnivalesque gypsy waltz; Helping Yourself puts a devious Curtis Eller-style spin on oldtime country gospel, spiced with an unexpectedly searing slide guitar solo. A spot-on early 50s style honkytonk tune that does double duty as raised middle finger to the boss, Cheap Reward unexpectedly quotes Elvis Costello; there’s also the careening slide guitar shuffle Aces and Twos and the unexpectedly epic Car Wreck. Good album – you can get it at the band’s site or pick one up at the show.

Purist, Rustic Americana from Vincent Cross

Songwriter Vincent Cross was a mainstay of the late, lamented Banjo Jim’s Americana music scene, but he’s hardly been idle since that club shut its doors. His previous album Home Away from Home was a pretty straight-up, purist bluegrass collection; his new one A Town Called Normal is a lot more eclectic, a mix of rustic acoustic Americana with a bit of folk-rock and traditional sounds from across the pond. Most of the album is streaming at various places, including Cross’ site and his myspace page. Cross sings with an unaffected, easygoing twang, plays guitars, mandolin and harmonica and has an excellent band behind him, incorporating the talents of various combinations of Bennett Sullivan and Doug Nicolaisen on banjos; Max Johnson, Allen Cohen and Larry Cook on bass; Mark Farrell on mandolin and Shane Kerwin on drums on a few tracks.

Several of the songs sound like they could be Appalachian standards…except that they’re originals. One of the richest sounding of these is Cursed, with its lusciously intermingled layers of banjo, mandolin and acoustic guitar. Cross has a way with aphoristic oldtime vernacular: “How can we distinguish the evil from the good? The chorus always should,” he observes on the title cut. Likewise, the metaphorically-charged cautionary tale Turn Your Eyes: “Warning bells from the mizzzen mast, don’t go down with the crew and cast.” And Childish Things – a catchy, swinging bluegrass-tinged original, not the James McMurtry hit – muses that “nobody knows why the caged bird sings til you put away your childish things.”

My Love starts out quietly and then builds to a neat series of tradeoffs between Cross’ harmonica and nimble guitar flatpicking. Old Christmas Wrapping, a bittersweet waltz, goes into down-and-out Tom Waits territory, but less pessimistically. Walking on the Outside sounds suspiciously like an acoustic version of Son Volt’s Tearstained Eye, with a soulful dobro solo. Sometimes builds up to a brooding, hypnotic two-chord jam, while Trouble Being There evokes Matt Keating with its wry surrealism and gentle folk-rock melody.

There’s also Footnotes, a brooding polyrhythmic miniature; Wrack and Ruin, which takes a stab at honkytonk; and a nicely syncopated take of the traditional folk song Cuckoo, “who never hollers ‘cuckoo’ til the 4th day of July.” How’s that for symbolism?  Cross is at the American Folk Art Museum on 4/26 at 5:30 PM.

Salons and Suspects

This blog’s raison d’etre extends beyond publicizing the Sunday Salon at Zirzamin. But while the Salon was created to provide a forum for the best rock and rock-related songwriters in town to work up new material, it’s also designed to be a show that, if all the performers are on their game, is as fun to watch as it is to play. The last few weeks have been pretty amazing, with steady contributions from art-rock cellist Serena Jost (who’s got a brand-new album coming out next month, and a gig here on the 17th at 7); barroom sage John Hodel, who brought out an understated and absolutely haunting elegy for the Newtown massacre; Walter Ego (more about him a little later on this page), Chris Fuller, who held the crowd rapt with his edgy gypsy and bluesy sounds; and LJ Murphy, who with his band the Accomplices scorched through one of the hardest-rocking, intense sets the club has ever seen, to wind up Salon #14.

Chanteuse Carol Lipnik and pianist Matt Kanelos headlined Salon #15: both are pushing the envelope harder than ever toward the avant garde, with a spacious, pillowy, psychedelic yet often clenched-teeth intensity. The high points of their show were their hypnotic, apprehensively trance-inducing originals, although their covers were just as interesting. A few of the highlights were a nocturnal, enveloping version of Harry Nilsson’s Life Line; a jaggedly stunning, percussive version of Nick Drake’s Black-Eyed Dog with some cruelly difficult crosshanded work by Kanelos; and a tale of Richard Thompson’s The Great Valerio so intense that you could hear a pin drop between chords, They’re playing Joe’s Pub on an excellent doublebill with historically-informed, theatrical Poor Baby Bree this Sunday the 17th.

The joke going around the club afterward was that this was the coldest night of the year, yet Asheville, North Carolina bluegrass band Town Mountain packed the place. It makes you wonder how much crazier the crowd would have been if this was a summer evening. Frontman/guitarist Robert Greer sang with a soulful twang over Jesse Langlais’ rippling banjo, Bobby Britt’s fiddle and John Stickley’s bass. They did the first instrumental that Britt ever wrote, a killer tune with lots of unexpected changes, along with a mix of originals and covers that ran the gamut from the moody moonshine anthem Midnight Road, to a version of John Anderson’s Wild and Blue that gave new meaning to the song’s half-crazed drunken menace, to a couple of lickety-split romps including what seemed like a bluegrass update on the old Irish ballad Whiskey, Oh Whiskey. “Now for the doxology,” Greer announced to no one in particular, and then launched into the pensive drinking ballad Leave the Bottle, the shapeshifting title track to their excellent new album. It was a fun show, a cool reminder of how much good new bluegrass there is pushing up through the weeds not only here but everywhere.

The following night, former Dog Show bandleader Jerome O’Brien took the stage with that group’s lead guitarist Jack Martin for the first time since a Kid Congo Powers show sometime in the mid-90s. Both musicians share a wry sense of humor, Martin’s biting slide work and emphatic, hard-hitting phrases complementing O’Brien’s sardonic lyrical torrents. As underground NYC rock nostalgia, this was just about as good as catching the band at their peak at the C-Note or Tonic about ten years ago. As low-key as the show was – just two guys with guitars – the positive energy was through the roof, through the nonchalantly cruel Saturday Nights Are for Amateurs, a bouncy reinvention of If I Laugh Anymore I’ll Break – a slyly exuberant celebration of pre-gentrification nocturnal entertainment – and a knowing take of the big audience hit This One Thing. O’Brien has a monthly residency here and if all goes according to plan will be back at Zirzamin on April 8 at 7 PM.

Beninghove’s Hangmen played afterward. They’re another band with a residency here, Mondays at around 9:30, and as usual they rampaged through an assaultively psychedelic set of noir jazz and original film themes as well as the macabre surf rock of Surf n’ Turk and Surfin’ Satie. Frontman/saxophonist Bryan Beninghove likes Middle Eastern sounds, finds the missing link between Ethiopian melody and Erik Satie and knows his way around a latin tune. Guitarist Dane Johnson led them in a surprisingly low-key, oldschool version of Tequila before they got rolling, through a moody reggae vamp and a creepy new waltz. A little later they took Quatro Loko, a salsa groove that’s so cheery it just begs to be ripped to shreds, and did exactly that, with high-voltage soprano sax from Beninghove and a careening, tumbling Rick Parker trombone solo. They closed with a cover of Led Zep’s Kashmir that did justice to the original, right down to the bassline, while turning loose the stoned monster inside.

Salon #16 was one of the best ones so far, featuring an absolutely sizzling set by Trio Tritticali, who did double duty as the house string section, most notably in providing a lush, haunting backdrop for a couple of creepy Lorraine Leckie chamber pop songs. Who says classically trained players can’t improvise? Violist Leanne Darling, cellist Loren Dempster and violinist Helen Yee are brilliant composer-performers, “daring to go where no string trio has gone before,” as Darling made clear early on. They gave a raw nonchalant intensity to Osvaldo Pugliese’s tango La Yumba, Yee’s arrangement of Mark Orton’s Helium also spiced with brooding Argentinian flavor. Was the best song of the night Darling’s artful new arrangement of the Mohammed Abdel Wahab bellydance classic Zeima, or her ingenious baroque ska take on A Message to You Rudie, or Yee’s powerfully crescendoing Candles in the Windows, or Dempster’s haunting, chromatically-fueled anthem Who Knows Yet? It’s impossible to choose. The three wrapped up the show with Darling’s funky, Bowie-esque Issue No. 1 (title track to their most recent album) in an explosive flurry of chamber metal. They’re at Freddy’s on March 22 at 8.

Cutting-Edge Bluegrass from Town Mountain

Asheville, North Carolina’s Town Mountain are everything that’s good about bluegrass today. Their songs have the same kind of wry, aphoristic lyrics as the classics that obviously inspired them, but they’re completely in the here-and-now. On their latest album Leave the Bottle, they constantly leave you wanting more, considering that nobody plays a solo that goes on for more than a couple of bars before they hand it off to a bandmate.The songs are a mix of slow ballads and more upbeat material, with a couple of real barn-burners, played with fire and expertise by frontman Robert Greer on guitar, Phil Barker on mandolin, Jesse Langlais on banjo, Bobby Britt on fiddle and Jon Stickley on bass and guitar and produced with oldschool resonance by Nashville bass vet Mike Bub. They’re playing Zirzamin on Feb 17 at 8:30 after the Sunday Salon and then a 7 PM set by Coney Island gothic songstress Carol Lipnik with her intense pianist Matt Kanelos. If country music is your thing and you’re in New York, this is a show not to miss.

The album’s opening track is a killer kiss-off to a woman who goes off with a younger guy: “I grow more distinguished, you grow old and grey…a man of my experience is every gal’s delight,” Greer sings with more than a little satisfaction. As on many of the tracks, Langlais unleashes a rich, rippling river of banjo, spiced by an all-too-brief Britt fiddle break.

The title cut features some neat tempo shifts and solos pretty much all around: it’s a pensive reflection on killing time (with shotglass in hand) before reconnecting with a girl who’s somewhere else. The wry workingman’s complaint Up the Ladder takes a surprisingly effective shot at building a bluegrass song on a Chuck Berry riff, while Lawdog snarls at the po-po who make life miserable for bands up and down the bluegrass highway.

Loaded, a slow ballad, manages to be both a funny drinking song and serious at the same time – and that banjo again, damn, this guy is good! They follow that with a scampering, unexpectedly Acadian-tinged instrumental that reminds of the Punch Brothers in a particularly focused moment.

The doomed runaway ballad Away from Home evokes the Louvin Brothers in their creepiest storytelling moments; after that, the band picks up the pace with the briskly shuffling, bristling You Weighed Heavy on My Heart and then the resilient Heavy Stone. There’s also the rapidfire moonshiner anthem Run Junior Run, the sprightly Greenbud on the Flower (no, it’s not about what you’re thinking) and the jaunty come-on tune Don’t Go Home Tonight.

The Mumbo Gumbo Album Is Back in Print!

Mumbo Gumbo were either five years or twenty years ahead of their time, maybe both. And they were retro back in 1989 when the New York Americana quartet – not to be confused with the California band of the same name – recorded their only album, a cassette-only release, over the course of a marathon two-day, 20-song session. In the years that passed, guitarist/violinist Joe Flood and accordionist Rachelle Garniez would go on to become international touring artists; guitarist George Breakfast, now back in England, still performs, and Mark Ettinger remains as sympatico and eclectic a bassist as ever. And their album is back in print, newly digitized with ten bonus tracks. Much as it’s a charming and revealing look at these artists’ early years, it’s also prophetic: these four were making alt-country, albeit without drums, back when the guys in Wilco were still playing punk rock and the Mumfords were in diapers. And yet, Mumbo Gumbo were looking back, to the hippie folk of John Prine, 70s honkytonk and outlaw country as well as oldtime blues and latin sounds. The album is streaming all the way through at Flood’s Bandcamp page.

It’s amazing how distinctive a singer Garniez had already become at that point. This album only has two of her songs, but they’re the strongest tracks here. Swimming Pool Blue, the first song she ever wrote, is far more direct and dark than the dreamy, mentholated torch-blues version on her Crazy Blood album. And New Dog (called New Dog Blues here) is more coy and trad with its volleys of sly innuendos than the more theatrical recording on her classic 2003 Luckyday cd. She also sings lead on a casually sultry version of  Sway, a Pablo Beltran Ruiz bolero famously covered by Bobby Rydell, as well as Breakfast’s fetching Strollin’ with the Wind

The album opens with Flood’s vividly aphoristic, bluesy I’m in a Hole, which might be a Vietnam reference. His contributions also include the wryly shuffling, Dan Hicks-ish swing tune Good Morning Mr. Afternoon; the sureeal, swaying Keep Listening; the jaunty, latin-flavored My Heart’s an Open Book; the soul-tinged Hard Ain’t It Hard; and the Tex-Mex cheating ballad Night on the Town. Breakfast contributes Foolish Pride, a dead ringer for an early 70s Moe Bandy track; Make Babies, probably a big crowd-pleaser; Invite Her to Dance, a goodnatured waltz; Heaven, which has the suspicious feel of a country gospel parody; and the bluegrass romp Heading for the Hills, among others.

Throughout the album, the vocal harmonies soar, Garniez adds lithe accordion flourishes along with Flood’s casually dexterous fiddle lines and several biting George Breakfast breaks for mandolin – and is that a chorus box he’s playing through, or just a very resonant mando? The album ends on a rather ghoulish bluegrass note with Dead and Gone, foreshadowing the dark acoustic Americana sounds that would start to resonate throughout Brooklyn ten years later.

The 50 Best Albums of 2012

About five years ago, people were saying that the album was a thing of the past. How wrong that turned out to be! This year’s crop of albums was so absurdly good that it felt criminal to whittle it down to a hundred, let alone fifty. And the only way of getting it down to that number was to cut out all the “world music,” including reggae and Afrobeat and most of the gypsy sounds, because there was so much of that and it was all so good.

Bookmark this page and return often. Virtually all of these albums are streaming (click the links) or are available as free downloads: consider this your place to discover some amazing sounds that were too smart for the Bushwick and Wicker Park blogs, and too dangerous for corporate radio and tv.

1.  Ulrich Ziegler – their debut album
Dating back to the 90s,  guitarist Stephen Ulrich has been New York’s most distinguished noir composer. When he wasn’t writing film and tv music, he was leading the ferociously creepy instrumental trio Big Lazy. When that band broke up (the drummer left to join Gogol Bordello), Ulrich eventually teamed up with Itamar Ziegler from Pink Noise, and then released this haunting, reverb-drenched, surf/skronk/jazz/soundscape masterpiece. Stream it

2.  Chicha Libre – Canibalismo
Chicha Libre’s 2008 debut album Sonido Amazonico landed in the top ten and this one is arguably even better, a trippy, wickedly dub-influenced mix of Peruvian surf rock, slinky Andean and latin grooves, and surrealistic psychedelic rock. There is no more fun, or more danceable, band in New York than Chicha Libre. Band info and audio/video

3.  Raya Brass Band – Dancing on Roses, Dancing on Cinders
This fiery Brooklyn crew distinguish themselves from the hundreds of other excellent Balkan brass units by virtue of their long, scorching jams: nobody does that better. Stream it

4.  Botanica – What Do You Believe In
This era’s pre-eminent art-rock band’s most brooding, haunted album, a rich blend of gypsy-tinged melody, raw, roaring guitar, edgy piano and spooky organ. Stream it

5.  The Universal Thump – their full-length debut
The final and concluding installment of the most massive, richly orchestrated album on this list, a lushly symphonic double-cd mix of chamber pop, art-rock, psychedelia and quirky, theatrical indie pop. Stream it

6.  Rachelle Garniez – Sad Dead Alive Happy
The iconic, eclectic accordionist/chanteuse – who has sort of become the Dorothy Parker of underground rock – took a deep dive into soul and gospel sounds, with richly soaring results. Stream it

7.  The Japonize Elephants – Melodie Fantastique
One of the original gypsy bands, this enormous, theatrical circus rock crew took their game to the next level with this one. Stream it

8.  Lianne Smith – Two Sides of a River
An iconic presence in the New York Americana and rock scene since the late 90s, Smith’s debut album was legendary before it was finally released – and it’s as eclectic, psychedelic, haunting and funny as anything else on this list. And her amazing voice is better than ever. Stream it 

9.  Bobtown – Trouble I Wrought
Nobody writes more cleverly creepy acoustic Nashville gothic and bluegrass than Bobtown. With four first-rate songwriters, their sound is as diverse as it is dark. Stream it

10.  Jan Bell – Dream of the Miner’s Child
One of the great voices in Americana music, Bell made this into a concept album that linked British folk with the American country and bluegrass sounds that grew out of it  with a vivid sense of history and a tantalizing mix of classics and originals that sound like Appalachian standards. Stream it/free downloads

11. M Shanghai String Band – Two Thousand Pennies
The mighty eleven-piece Brooklyn acoustic Americana crew’s most lush, haunting, diverse and ultimately best album, ranging from gypsy and chamber pop to brooding Appalachian ballads and the rousing singalong songs they’re best known for. Stream it

12.. Love Camp 7 – Love Camp VII
An expertly wry, tuneful, catchy janglerock concept album looking at recent history through the prism of the Beatles, with a jaundiced eye and expertly labyrinthine polyrhythms. Given up for dead after the tragic loss of brilliant drummer Dave Campbell, the band has recently regrouped and is as playful and fun as ever. Stream it

13. Hannah vs. the Many – All Our Heroes Drank Here
Ferociously literate, white knuckle intense female-fronted punk and powerpop, with some noir cabaret and Jarvis Cocker-style art-rock thrown in for good measure. Stream it

14. The Larch– Days to the West
The follow-up to their 2010 masterpiece Larix Americana finds the Brooklyn retro new wavers sounding more psychedelic and more savagely lyrical than ever. Stream it

15. Lorraine Leckie and Anthony Haden-Guest – Rudely Interrupted
A blackly amusing, gorgeously orchestrated chamber-pop collaboration between the caustic social critic and the Canadian gothic rock siren.  Band info and a/v

16. Black Fortress of Opium – Stratospherical
Lush, roaring, darkly psychedelic Middle Eastern-tinged art-rock from this powerful, female-fronted Boston band. Stream it

17. Matt Keating – Wrong Way Home
The respected Americana rocker’s best single-disc album, a brooding, offhandedly menacing blend of classic soul, country and elegant chamber pop. Stream it

18. Alec K. Redfearn and the Eyesores  – Sister Death
Not to have this album in the #1 spot is pretty absurd: the Rhode Island band’s swirling, psychedelic, gypsy-tinged art-rock masterpiece is the most downright macabre collection on this list. Stream it

19.. The Sometime Boys – Ice & Blood
The second album from cabaret siren Sarah Mucho and art-rocker Kurt Leege’s sharply lyrical acoustic Americana project finds them funkier, more lush and more intense than ever. Stream it

20. Animation – Transparent Heart
As historically important as it is richly arrranged, saxophonist Bob Belden’s collection of cinematic instrumental themes traces the decline of New York over the past couple of decades, centered around 9/11 and the fascism that ensued. Band info and a/v

21. Tift Merritt – Traveling Alone
Marc Ribot’s guitar is amazing beyond belief, and Merrritt’s pensive Americana songs and nuanced vocals are as vivid as always.  Band info and a/v

22. Out of Order – Hey Pussycat
The loudest album on this list is by this assaultive all-female Long Island noiserock/punk trio, raw but richly produced by John Sharples. Stream it

23. Changing Modes – In Flight
With three keyboards and edgy lead guitar, these women and guys play biting, lyrical art-rock and new wave-influenced sounds. Stream it

24. Chris Erikson & the Wayward Puritans – Lost Track of the Time
Erikson has been one of the great guitarists in Americana for years, in other peoples’ bands. This is his long-overdue debut as a leader, a careening, gorgeously twangy mix of Americana, paisley underground psychedelia and riff-rock. Stream it

25. Marissa Nadler – The Sister
The Nashville gothic/noir cabaret chanteuse/songwriter’s most haunting and atmospheric album since her debut, a darkly nebulous, allusive gem. Stream it/free downloads

26. Spanking Charlene – Where Are the Freaks
Female-fronted Americana punk band with  powerful, intense lead vocals, hooks that run the gamut from the Stooges to X and a potently snide, sarcastic, spot-on worldview. Stream it

27. Frankenpine – In That Black Sky
Creepy original bluegrass, Appalachian ballads and elegantly dark acoustic sounds from this diverse Brooklyn band. Stream it/free dowloads

28. Choban Elektrik – their debut album
A side project by members of Zappa cover band Project/Object, they take classic Balkan and gypsy themes and make trippy psychedelic rock out of them. Stream it

29. Slavic Soul Party – New York Underground Tapes
The wildly popular Brooklyn Balkan brass band at the top of their funky, surprisingly eclectic, intensely danceable game. Stream it

30. Saint Maybe – Things As They Are
A throwback to the paisley underground bands of the 80s like True West and the Dream Syndicate, this project by a Patti Smith guitarist and Bob Dylan’s drummer mixes surreal, apocalyptic imagery and raw, surreal, psychedelic Americana rock. Stream it 

31. Mike Rimbaud – Can’t Judge a Song By Its Cover
The New York underground rocker – who also put out an excellent album of originals last year, and constantly releases video singles – puts his indelibly New York spin on politically charged classics by Phil Ochs, Dylan, the Stones and others. Stream it

32. When the Broken Bow – We, the Dangerous Weapons
A surreal, fearlessly political, apocalyptic concept album by this Oregon band  that runs the gamut from soul-pop to careening art-rock to goth and gypsy sounds. Stream it

33. Tim Foljahn – Songs for an Age of Extinction
Grimly lyrical, pensively psychedelic noir chamber pop and Americana-influenced songwriting. Stream it

34. Demolition String Band – Gracious Days
The well-loved New York Americana/bluegrass/rock twanglers’ best electric album, an intoxicating blend of guitars, mandolins, banjo and Elena Skye’s velvet vocals. Stream it

35. The Brixton Riot – Palace Amusements
Sort of the missing link between the Jam and Guided by Voices, this New Jersey band blast their way through a series of hard-hitting, swirling, lyrically biting three-minute songs. Stream it

36. L’il Mo & the  Monicats – Whole Lotta Lovin
Americana chanteuse Monica Passin’s most intimate and eclectic album to date, with soaring harmonies from fellow Americana siren Drina Seay. Song samples

37. Leigh Marble – Where the Knives Meet Between the Rows
Brooding, bitterly lyrical songwriting with a mix of hypnotically psychedelic and Americana-flavored tunes from the Portland, Oregon bandleader. Stream it

38. Eilen Jewell – Queen of the Minor Key
Truth in advertising – Jewel excels at noir Americana, ghoulabilly, garage rock and oldschool psychedelic sounds. Band info and a/v

39. Mucca Pazza – Safety Fifth
A characteristically high-voltage mix of short but sonically titanic gypsy punk and gypsy rock songs from the brass-heavy Chicago dance orchestra. Stream it

40. Chicago Stone Lightning Band – their debut album
With a raw, guitar-fueled edge, their twin-Gibson assault covers classic 60s style Chicago blues, riff-driven stoner rock, original soul and funk. Stream it

41. Emily Jane White – Ode to Sentience
Intense, broodingly lyrical, intricately orchestrated Nashville gothic and art-rock sounds. Band info and a/v 

42. My Education – A Drink for All My Friends
The Austin postrock/instrumental band have never sounded more lush or guitarishly intense on this mix of desert rock and cinematic themes. Stream it

43. Tom Shaner – Ghost Songs, Waltzes and Rock n Roll
That such a great album would be this low on the list attests to how amazing this past year was for music. The former Industrial Tepee frontman has never written more richly or lyrically than he does on this southwestern gothic gem. Band info and video

44. Jon DeRosa – A Wolf in Preacher’s Clothes
The Brooklyn crooner comes across as sort of a cross between Jarvis Cocker and Leonard Cohen, with a mix of lush chamber pop, Americana and 80s-influenced gothic art-rock. Band info and a/v

45. The Sweetback Sisters – Lookin’ for a Fight
This amazing two-frontwoman honkytonk band not in the top ten? How can that be possible? Take a look at the rest of the list. Stream it

46. Band of Outsiders – Sound Beach Quartet
The 80s psychedelic punk legends are still going strong, with a richly jangly, snaky new ep that evokes Television as well as the Jesus & Mary Chain, both groups whose careers they’ve now eclipsed. Stream it 

47. Mighty High – Legalize Tre Bags
The funniest album of the year blends roaring Motorhead-style biker rock with woozy stoner riffage and some of the best weed jokes ever put on vinyl. Stream it

48. The Weal and Woe – The One to Blame
Gorgeously harmony-driven oldschool honkytonk and 1950s style proto-rockabilly sounds from this wonderfully retro Brooklyn band. Stream it

49. Guided by Voices – The Bears for Lunch
Agelessly energetic, prolific indie surrealist Robert Pollard hasn’t lost a thing: this is the third and best release in the band’s incredibly productive 2012, not including Pollard’s own solo releases. Band info and a/v

50. Ian Hunter – When I’m President
Last but hardly least on this list, another ageless rocker from an even earlier era put out an album that could be the great lost Stones classic from 30 years ago. Band info/free downloads 

High-Voltage Oldschool Bluegrass from Foghorn Stringband

It wouldn’t be fair to let the year go by without a mention of Portland, Oregon’s Foghorn Stringband and their latest album Outshine the Sun. What they play isn’t tidy, polished folkie-club bluegrass: it’s raw, ramshackle dance music recorded live around a single central mic, just as the band plays it at festivals across the country. Ecstatic, high lonesome four-part harmonies are everywhere. The band’s two main singers, mandolinist Caleb Klauder and guitarist Reeb Willms, spend a lot of their time sliding up and around the blue notes in the scale, adding to the rustic, oldtime feel. This particular album is mostly upbeat party music with a couple of waltzes thrown in to mix it up; all of the tracks, for whatever it’s worth, are in major keys. This is the kind of music that just makes you want to pick up your instrument and jump right in, even if that just means singing along with the harmonies. If they hailed from New York, they would be a Jalopy band.

Good as the vocals are here, they don’t necessarily need them: two tracks into the album, and they’re swinging through a lively fiddle breakdown, Humpback Mule. The opening track, Be Kind to a Man While He’s Down makes a good current-day depression anthem, followed by Homestead on the Farm, an update on vintage Carter Family style sounds, Willms taking the lead vocal.

Virginia Girls, also sung by Willms, foreshadows Merle Travis’ Sixteen Tons. Fiddler Sammy Lind digs in hard on the rhythically tricky Western Union as Klauder doubles up the melody line. Willms is as much a part of the rhythm as bassist Nadine Landry, and she adds smartly placed color, especially at the end of Whoah Mule, a lickety-split romp, and the wryly amusing twin-guitar ballad Over the Garden Wall. The girl in that song is petite, so she has to stand on a chair in order to kiss the guy over the fence. There’s also several country gospel tunes, a creepy elegy for somebody’s dead mom, and the sad, poignant Just a Few Old Memories. Watch this space for upcoming NYC shows.

Beautiful, Haunting, Evocative Mining Songs from Jan Bell

Jan Bell has one of the most distinctive and beautiful voices in any style of music. She’s never sung or written more vividly or poignantly than she does on her new concept album Dream of the Miner’s Child. A miner’s granddaughter, she traces the seam of coal that runs under the Atlantic from Wales to the Carolinas to make connection between the traditional songs of the Yorkshire mining country where she grew up, and the Appalachian ballads of her adopted land. A small ocean liner’s worth of Americana talent, including her bandmates from the acclaimed all-female Maybelles, joins her on this virtually all-acoustic collection recorded at various stops around the world. Soaring with vocal harmonies and prominent violin, it’s a richly purist, gorgeously subtle album, much of it propelled with a casually expert country swing by bassist Tim Luntzel and drummer Brian Geltner.

It opens with a briskly plaintive version of Jean Ritchie’s The L and N Don’t Stop Here Anymore (referring to a railroad rather than a New York subway line), Bell’s honey-and-nettle vocals contrasting with an austerely soaring Rima Fand violin solo. Yorkshire Water, an elegant chamber pop-flavored original, sets nuanced harmonies from Melissa Carper and the Be Good Tanyas‘ Samantha Parton over spare lines from Truckstop Honeymoon guitarist Mike West and pianist Katie Euliss.

Bell does Trixie Smith’s oldtime Mining Camp Blues closer to Davis Sisters-style country, joining harmonies with Alice Gerrard, Megan Palmer supplying rustic fiddle ambience. The title track, a wistful duet with Jolie Holland, looks back both to the 1925 Vernon Dalhart version as well as the original 1907 Welsh mining disaster ballad. Ewan MacColl’s Dirty Old Town, a duet with Will Scott, is considerably more subtle – and strangely evocative – than the haphazard Pogues version.

Another Bell original, Elsecar Grace aka John Willliams, carries a cruelly ironic narrative with a vintage soul/gospel melody. Her midtempo take on Darrell Scott’s haunting You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive is nonchalantly chilling, while Juliet Russell adds her voice to an absolutely otherworldly a-cappella duet on Brian O’Higgins A Stor Mo Chroi.

M Shanghai String Band’s Philippa Thompson and Hilary Hawke join Bell on her Maybelles bandmate Karen Dahlstrom’s The Miner’s Bride, a brooding tale of a mail-order marriage in the old west made even more ominous by Thompson’s ghostly singing saw. Casey Neill shares vocals and adds electric guitar on a gently insistent, impactful take of Billy Bragg’s workingman’s anthem Between the Wars. Bell follows that with a Woody Guthrie lyric, Union Sea and makes ragtime-tinged antique pop out of it.

The catchiest of the originals here is Aunt Molly Jackson, the Carper Family (Melissa Carper, Beth Chrisman, Jenn Miori and Brennen Leigh) adding rich harmonies to this brisk oldschool C&W number. The most British of the tracks here is Carried by the Wind, Bell joined by Salty Pink’s Amelia Sauter and  Leah Houghtaling. Bell and Palmer end the album with an a-cappella take of the traditional Irish ballad Factory Girl. Life in mining country on both sides of the Atlantic was hard; Bell and her all-star cast deliver these songs with a potent bittersweetness that reflects both the hopes and grim realities of the people who created them, at the same time adding memorably to the repertoire. It’s not a stretch to imagine future generations of Americana musicians referencing the Jan Bell versions of many of these songs: this album secures her place among the finest and most individualistic musicians in that world. Bell plays the album release show at Barbes at 8 PM this Friday, Dec 14; high-voltage Balkan band Sherita (a Raya Brass Band spinoff) kicks off the evening at 7.

Cahalen Morrison and Eli West Give Fresh Air to Some Old Sounds

There’s an army of curmudgeous out there who’ll be the first to say, petulantly, that what Cahalen Morrison and Eli West do isn’t bluegrass, or country music. They’re right – it isn’t. What they do is energetic acoustic songs with rock, bluegrass, country, American and British folk influences. They’re sort of an edgier teens counterpart to 70s hippie acoustic gropus like the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band or Aztec Two-Step, putting their own spin on an old sound. Multi-instrumentalist Morrison’s ancestors hail from the Isle of Lewis off the Scottish coast, home to a rich and rugged musical tradition that percolated down to him. If he does it somewhat differently, that’s only to be expected: after all, you can’t keep music in a museum. Our Lady of the Tall Trees, his second album with guitarist Eli West (a name worthy of a Robert Hunter character, huh?) blends the antique vernacular that these guys obviously love so much into a current-day one, both lyrically and musically.

Morrison and West have a warm musical chemistry and add soaring vocal harmonies on several of these songs. Morrison plays several different guitars as well as banjo and mandolin. His mandolin playing, in particular, is sensationally good: when he picks that thing up, he grows fangs. West is a nimble flatpicker whose style draws as much on jamband rock as it does on Americana, although he doesn’t let those uncertain open chords linger too long or slide down the slope into the meh-ness of Dave Matthews and his ilk.

The opening track, Stone to Send, sets the stage, pensive lyrics juxtaposed with the first of many bitingly delicous mandolin interludes. They bring a tricky polyrhythmic edge to an Elizabethan waltz and then add understatedly psychedelic guitar to All I Can Do, a stark, minor key banjo/mandolin tune. Loretta has a casually swaying acoustic Grateful Dead-ly vibe: are the words “play your blue and wailin’ song,” or “play your Boo and Waylon song”?

The title track nicks a well-known John Prine tune for the verse, with similarly surreal lyrics: “She wraps herself in rice and greens and all the other fancy things she bought… supper is served!”

Morrison and West depict a vividly pensive campfire conversation with their guitars on a first-rate version of the traditional western ballad The Poor Cowboy; a little later, they take the bluegrass standard Church Street Blues back to its British folk origins. The lively playing on the country waltz All for the Sake of Day downplays its brooding lyric – it wouldn’t be out of place on the Dead’s Reckoning album.

The next track, Heartland Sea takes the starkly bluesy tune underneath it and gives it wings. There’s also a long, crisply delivered banjo/guitar bluegrass breakdown, and a funny honkytonk song done as Appalachian folk, literally taking the style back to its roots. The album ends with Red Prairie Dawn, a laid-back but spiky instrumental that wouldn’t be out of place on an early Pat Metheny album if the guitars were plugged in.

Fans of Chris Thile and his work with the Punch Brothers will love this stuff, although these guys are considerably more roughewn and less polished. Old Deadheads will too. It’s also tempting to say that the Bon Iver crowd might like it, but that might be a stretch, since Morrison and West put plenty of sweat into building a narrative or trying to put an emotion across rather than faking it.