Posts Tagged ‘Lera Lynn’

LERA LYNN – ” Lera Lynn Plays Well With Others “

Posted: June 23, 2018 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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This week the new releases are plenty hot. Lera Lynn, Jeffrey Foucault, and T. Hardy Morris break new ground with their new records, building on careers that started out promising and haven’t let us down one bit along the way.

Lera Lynn, and her songs that owed as much to heavy-lidded space-rock and psychedelia as to country music: think the Black Angels meets Bright Black Morning Light, but with insistent grooves. It was a fine blurring of styles and I got really into her record Resistor . On the new “Plays Well With Others”, Lera Lynn once again cuts her own path. Unlike many duets and guest star-oriented records, many of the songs on Plays Well With Othersare originals, co-written for this collection and then tracked live. There’s a wide sonic and emotional range, too, making this half-hour duets record an engaging album in Lynn’s discography.

The most memorable songs hearken to earlier musical eras. Lynn and John Paul White’s (previously of The band Civil Wars) cover of “Almost Persuaded” strips the David Houston song down its Opry-esque core, giving it the straightforward swing of a 1950s honky-tonk radio staple. Appropriately, Nicole Atkins duet “In Another Life” captures the crestfallen romance of early rock ballads. A straightforward, poignant hook of “In another life/you’re mine” rides a progression that would have been right at home at another spot of the 1950s radio dial.

Lynn also explores the twilit soundscapes that made Resistor such an intriguing listen. For one, Plays Well With Others opens gradually with haunted atmospheric swells courtesy of a bowed double bass, leading into her Peter Bradley Adams duet “Same Old Song,” while the Andrew Combs duet “Breakdown” moves with a familiar up-tempo sinuous grace. And on Lynn and Shovels and Rope’s cover of TV on the Radio’s “Wolf Like Me,” they transform the driving, twistedly danceable indie-pop number into a shambling Old Weird America tale. When the three sing “we could jet in a stolen car/but we wouldn’t get too far/before the transformation takes/and the bloodlust tanks/and the crave gets slaked/my mind has changed/my body’s frame/but god, I like it” over patient folk-rock, it alters the listener’s perception of the song’s metaphorical werewolf. Rather than bounding feverishly through a neon landscape in search of warm flesh as the wolf does in the TV on the Radio original, Lynn and Shovels and Rope’s werewolf is a patient, calculating beast — and it’s almost more frightening for it.

And sometimes Lynn just feels like having fun, such as when she and JD McPherson gleefully howl “I don’t want nothin’ to do with your love.” On Plays Well With Others, Lynn and her collaborators are obviously enjoying themselves immensely. Fortunately for the rest of us, they brought some excellent new songs into the world in the process.

ANDREW COMBS – ” Canyons of My Mind “

Posted: April 10, 2017 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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On “Dirty Rain,” the first single from Canyons of My Mind, Andrew Combs pondered our fading grasp on consequence – and how, in an time now where we are all preoccupied with instant gratification and polish in the name of progress, we could be fast approaching a dark, joyless future. Self-awareness and a sensitivity for the world around him is a theme rich across the Nashville-based songwriter’s forthcoming third album.

From the album Canyons Of My Mind, available April 7th, 2017.

Thrilled to release this record into the world. “Canyons of My Mind” is out now via New West Records and Loose Music. A Big Thanks to my two buds Skylar Wilson and Jordan Lehning for producing and playing. Lots of love to Jeremy Ferguson for engineering and mixing. And to the wonderful band for bringing these songs to life: Dominic Billett, Michael Rinne, Ethan Ballinger.  thanks to Melissa Madison Fuller for the ace photos and Fetzer Design for the design. Andrew.

“I wrote ‘Blood Hunters’ in this post-tour haze, where you don’t know what to do with yourself,”

Combs says. “It’s about mental illness and this unknown force that is making you question everything. It takes 48 hours to acclimate at the end of tour, and it’s a weird time when you are in limbo. You get restless.”

Directed by Ry Cox, the video for “Blood Hunters” takes that fear of the unknown and puts it into a force tangible enough to look at – and nods at how some things are easier to confront when one returns to a more peaceful, natural state as Combs does, ankle-deep in the Piney River. With backup from Lera Lynn – whose recent album Shape Shifter shares a sense of sonic fearlessness with Canyons – the song opens with Combs‘ soothingly gorgeous vocals on haunting echo and spare electric guitar that crescendos into a fierce, Seattle-riffed fury. The musical gambit removes it even further away from the constraints of traditional country to forge a more experimental, rock-forward take on folk in the vein of Kevin Morby, Angel Olsen, Cass McCombs or even their forefather, Leonard Cohen.

“Canyons of My Mind” was produced by Skylar Wilson (Justin Townes Earle) and Jordan Lehning (Rodney Crowell) at Battle Tapes Studio in East Nashville, and features appearances from Caitlin Rose, who also co-wrote a song, as well as Erin Rae McKaskle and Lynn.