Anana Kaye is a Nashville based Indie Alt-Americana Duo. Hailing from Georgia (The country) Anana Kaye and Irakli Gabriel deliver a unique and distinctly European sound rarely experienced in such potent doses today. With influences including Kate Bush, Nick Cave and David Bowie their music is a genre bending experience akin to twisting kaleidoscope
Señor (Tales of Yankee Power)” first appeared on Bob Dylan’s 1978 album Street-Legal, and it’s an urgent-yet-winding enigma. Nashville’sAnana Kaye has recently shared her dusky version of it — a windswept drama with a wild heart shot starkly in black and white. You can find streaming links for it right here, and it’s available from her https://ananakaye.bandcamp.com Bandcamp page as well.
Bully and its frontwoman, Alicia Bognanno, have been getting Kurt Cobain comparisons since their 2015 debut, Feels Like. (It doesn’t hurt that she studied at the feet of Nirvana producer Steve Albini.) So hearing the Nashville band cover Nirvana is almost too obvious but, good God, is it glorious.
Their spin on 1989’s “About a Girl” strikes a perfect balance of raw and melodic, without ever sounding like the output of a cover band. Bognanno’s home-recorded production and instrumentation definitely capture the original’s energy: The guitars come in grunge-heavy before her voice slumps onto the scene, voice tearing on the high notes.
Still, it’s not just a skilled copy of a classic. She mixes in some experimental guitar squeals on the instrumental and a truly trippy solo that keeps the sound from going thoroughly Nineties. Plus, Bognanno differentiates herself from your average karaoke crooner with her stellar delivery. When she wails, “I’ll take advantage while/You hang me out to dry/But I can’t see you every night/Free” you almost forget that she was a kid when Cobain ripped through the track in 1993 for MTV’s Unplugged.
“I do” becomes a chanted mantra at the end of the song, before it ends abruptly, futuristic time-warp complete.
Normally during this time I’d be running around trying to promote the upcoming record and rehearsing to get ready to tour again but given the circumstances I’m trying to work with what I can do at home alone. I picked a couple sub pop songs to cover to release something in the meantime. I played everything on these songs (for better or worse haha) and tracked them in my living room. Gotta do what ya gotta to spice it up sometimes. Anywho more soon!!
Lilly Hiatt’s excellent new album? Well, she is just so consistent in her approach. While the songs aren’t repetitive by any stretch, they are all built on a tasty guitar lick before Lilly’s voice hooks me like a marlin as she paints these vignettes of good times and bad. Overall, this album is a little less personal than Trinity Lane and has a sound that leans a little more to the rock side than the Americana side.
“Don’t you hate when people say, ‘It is what it is,’” Lilly Hiatt sings in “P-Town.” But there’s nothing left to fate on the songwriter’s Walking Proof, a deliberate record of tight jangle-rock songs and ethereal ballads. Like “P-Town,” “Brightest Star” mines R.E.M. Monster-era guitars, while the hypnotic “Drawl” is a meditation on self-repair. In “Little Believer,” she tells a tale of neglect with an author’s attention to detail (“A man caught a shark and he set it free/I started clapping, and he laughed at me”). Hiatt found her voice on 2017’s Trinity Lane; here, she fine-tunes her instrument into the sound of a new Nashville.
The album has a few timely tracks for our self-isolation. P-Town tackles a shitty day with humor and exasperation. Candy Lunch wants you to be able to deal with the shit we can’t control; make the best of the situation. Drawl wants us to find the beauty in the simple things; something I have been trying to do these last couple of weeks. Hiatt continues to cement her place at the table of the best songwriters around these days. She is as consistent as they come.
Lilly Hiatt’s songs are disarmingly personal and immensely endearing, even when she’s singing about fucking up—which is pretty often. There’s an almost parasocial element to Hiatt’s song writing: Her voice is like that of an old friend who’s perpetually in various stages of getting her shit together. Hiatt’s fourth album, Walking Proof, forms something of a thematic trilogy with her last two albums: 2015’s Royal Blue, a portrait of a relationship in its death throes, and 2017’s harder, darker Trinity Lane, which depicted its immediate aftermath. Hiatt spent both albums seeking solace and guidance for her troubles everywhere she could, from family to her favourite records. On Walking Proof, she’s emerged wiser and more confident, ready even to dispense advice of her own. She also finds herself in full command of her broad stylistic palette, melding influences as disparate as backwoods country and garage punk into a cohesive signature sound. There are a couple of lingering references to Hiatt’s past relationship problems. But when, in the hauntingly stark closer “Scream,” she claims, “I swear to God I’m done with him,” it’s convincing this time.
Released March 27th, 2020 Musicians:
Lilly Hiatt: vocals, guitar
John Condit: guitar
Robert Hudson: bass, mandolin
Kate Haldrup: drums
Lincoln Parish: guitar, keys
Travis Goodwin: keys
Guests:
Aaron Lee Tasjan: guitar on “Little Believer,” vocals on “Never Play Guitar”
John Hiatt: vocals on “Some Kind of Drug”
Amanda Shires: vocals and fiddle on “Walking Proof,” vocals on “Drawl”
Luke Schneider: pedal steel on “Move”
Its poetry reflective with a dusty realism, “American Steel” is the sweetly-stirring brand-new single from Nashville’sVan Darien and its tough new video captures a sympathetic nostalgia. The track appears on her recently-released, ten-song Levee LP. You can find all the relevant streaming and download links you’ll need to listen to it by visiting her website,
The Texas singer-songwriterVan Darienhas the unmistakable gift of gracing listeners with a sense of place and song by her enrapturing voice alone.This enchanting talent came from in the blue-collar industrial backyard that Darien grew up surrounded by, and as a result, that aesthetic has remained engrained in her music since relocating to Nashville in 2015.
Van Darien will independently release her full-length debut titledLevee, an album that strings together personal experiences bound by water and steel.Produced by Steven Cooper and JD Tiner at East Nashville’s Glass Onion Studio,Leveeserves as a 2020 must-hear record that showcases her poignant songwriting with contagious elements of pop and Americana.Darien’s full-length debut features contributions from Brandy Zdan, Owen Beverly (Indianola), Thayer Serrano (Cracker, Patterson Hood, Nicole Atkins), Mando Saenz, Joey Green, and Maren Morris, with Morris co-writing the tracks “Low Road” and “Twisted Metal.”
Brave is a sword song. Writing it made me feel armed to face my lesser self. Because becoming a better version of myself requires taking account of the painful missteps along the way and fighting the anguish of facing them. And to ultimately (and hopefully) come out better than who I was before. Taller and stronger. This is the highest achievement a human being can hope for, everything else is secondary.
In conjunction with the song, Kelly will release a new “Brave” t-shirt today with a design featuring his handwritten lyrics. All proceeds from t-shirt sales will be donated to MusiCares.
The new song adds to a breakthrough series of years for Kelly, whose most recent project, Dirt Emo Vol. 1, was released this past fall via Rounder Records (stream/purchase here). Co-produced by Kelly and Jarrad K, the eight-song release consists of Kelly’s favorite songs including a rendition of Dashboard Confessional’s “Screaming Infidelities” featuring the band’s lead singer Chris Carrabba, a live cover of Wheatus’ “Teenage Dirtbag” and new versions of The Carter Family’s “Weeping Willow” and Taylor Swift’s “All Too Well.” Kelly’s version of “All Too Well” was released to widespread critical praise and garnered attention from Swift herself. Billboard declared, “Kelly puts his own haunting spin on the track with yearning vocals, delicate percussion and soaring instrumentation,” while UPROXX praised, “his rendition is a beautiful tribute to the raw emotionality of the original. He makes the song his own with atmospheric instrumentals, replacing Swift’s driving percussion with drums that sound more soft and searching.”
The EP follows the release of Kelly’s critically acclaimed, full-length debut album, Dying Star, in the fall of 2018 . Co-produced by Kelly and Jarrad K, Dying Star landed on several “Best of 2018” lists including Rolling Stone, Paste, UPROXX, American Songwriter and NPR Music, which declared, “Kelly digs down deep on Dying Star to fearlessly put forth a set of songs steeped in emotional twists, turns and complications…This here is powerful stuff.”
After two studio albums and nearly seven years as a band, Free Throw is making a significant change to their identity. The group who has sung openly of personal struggles related to substance abuse and body image is holding nothing back on What’s Past is Prologue, their third full length record, due out March 29th, 2019 on Triple Crown Records.
Free Throw have written a rager that’s too unhinged to be fun, This album is very much about me hitting rock bottom from a mental health standpoint and the process I took in building myself back up,” Castro explained. “With the last record, I was trying to talk about my mental health, but at the time I was actually going through it. The last album felt like I was yelling from the void. This time I’m looking back into the void and I’m able to understand what was going on.”
Band Members
Cory Castro,
Lawrence Warner,
Justin Castro,
Jake Hughes,
Kevin Garcia
Free Throw “Motorcycle, No Motor” Triple Crown Records
I’ll be honest, I don’t know much about Nashville’s Maggie Rose, but was told to drop everything and listen to her second album. I tend to hate traditonal style country music, but this album reminds me just how good that genre can be when it’s full of heart instead of studio polish. Change also radiates with the glory and divine feminine energy of that first Indigo Girls album, you now, the one most dudes have in their record collections. As it steadily builds steam, it turns into a bonafide rock and roll record, reminding me of the days when Linda Ronstadt released bonafide rock and roll records. Perhaps with this album and it’s little bit of country, little bit of honey, and little bit of booty shaking, we finally have something everyone on the Right and Left can agree on.
In 2018, Rose was named a YouTube Emerging Artist and a Artist to Watch. Quickly being recognized as a formidable force in the pop-soul, jam-band arena, Rose performed aboard the Cayamo Cruise with performers including Jason Isbell, Emmylou Harris and Dawes, and she opened tour dates as support for Kelly Clarkson’s Meaning Of Life Tour.
In addition to his new album, Jason Isbell unveiled the lead single, “Be Afraid,” as well as a tour with dates that run from February until September. and span headlining shows to festivals. Grammy Award-winning singer, songwriter and musician Jason Isbell and his band the 400 Unit will release their highly anticipated new album, “Reunions”, May 15th via Spunk Records. Produced by Grammy Award-winning producer Dave Cobb and recorded at Nashville’s historic RCA Studio A, the album features 10 new songs written by Isbell including album track, “Be Afraid,”.
Reunions is Isbell’s seventh full-length studio album and the fourth released with his band, the 400 Unit: Derry deBorja (piano, keyboard, organ, omnichord), Chad Gamble (drums, tambourine), Jimbo Hart (bass), Amanda Shires (fiddle) and Sadler Vaden (acoustic guitar, electric guitar). The new album also includes background vocals from special guests David Crosby (Crosby, Stills & Nash, the Byrds) and Jay Buchanan (Rival Sons)..
Jason Isbell & The 400 Unit have shared a new song from their forthcoming album Reunions which is out May 15. “Only Children” is spare and somber and quite lovely.
“There are a lot of ghosts on this album,” Isbell said in a press release. “Sometimes the songs are about the ghosts of people who aren’t around anymore, but they’re also about who I used to be, the ghost of myself. I found myself writing songs that I wanted to write 15 years ago, but in those days, I hadn’t written enough songs to know how to do it yet. Just now have I been able to pull it off to my own satisfaction. In that sense, it’s a reunion with the me I was back then.”
Of the release, Isbell shares, “There are a lot of ghosts on this album. Sometimes the songs are about the ghosts of people who aren’t around anymore, but they’re also about who I used to be, the ghost of myself. I found myself writing songs that I wanted to write fifteen years ago, but in those days, I hadn’t written enough songs to know how to do it yet. Just now have I been able to pull it off to my own satisfaction. In that sense it’s a reunion with the me I was back then.”
Originally from Green Hill, Alabama and now based in Nashville, Isbell is widely renowned as one of the greatest songwriters of his generation. Since the release of his breakthrough solo album, Southeastern, in 2013,
NPR Music calls him, “one of the finest singer-songwriters working at the intersection of folk, country and rock today,” and continues, “his songs have an exquisite, rawboned realism and deeply embedded class consciousness,” while American Songwriter declares, “There’s no better songwriter on the planet at this moment, no one operating with the same depth, eloquence or feeling” and USA Today proclaims, “he has developed into one o the great American songwriters…in a world where most pop songs are lies, Isbell is determined to find truth.”
Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit“Be Afraid”Southeastern Records marketed and distributed by Thirty Tigers
Jason Isbell’s seventh solo album, “Reunions”, will be released on May 15th.
Confronting the ongoing mental health and familial trials that have plagued Allison since pre-pubescence, “Color Theory” explores three central themes: blue, representing sadness and depression; yellow, symbolizing physical and emotional illness; and, finally, grey, representing darkness, emptiness and loss.
Written mostly while on tour and recorded in Allison’s hometown of Nashville at Alex The Great, Color Theory was produced by Gabe Wax (who also produced Clean), mixed by Lars Stalfors (Mars Volta, HEALTH, St. Vincent), and features the live Soccer Mommy band on studio recording for the first time, with a live take at the foundation of almost every track. The resulting album is a masterpiece that paints an uncompromisingly honest self-portrait of an artist who, according to 100+ publications, already released one of the Best Albums of 2018 and the 2010s, and is about to release an early favorite of 2020.
Jack White’s been so commonly associated with rock ‘n’ roll over the years that it’s been easy to overlook the fact that he often works similar to how dance producers do. For starters, there’s nothing more explicitly tied to how dance music operates than running your own label to put out releases from yourself and others — and more broadly, since emerging at the turn of the century with his and Meg White’s beloved, now defunct White Stripes, White’s dipped in and out of various projects that more or less function as monikers under which he explores certain sounds.
White unearths or returns to these projects when the mood suits him, and they often bear their own distinct sonic identity. Besides the White Stripes’ arty blues-punk, he’s unleashed jet-black scuzziness with the Kills’ Alison Mosshart as the Dead Weather, embraced an anything-goes mentality with the music released under his own name, and tilted towards country-rock windmills with power-pop whiz Brendan Benson and members of defunct Detroit garage-rock act the Greenhornes as the Raconteurs.
White’s choosing to unearth this month a new Raconteurs’ album the bands third, “Help Us Stranger”. It’s the first album from the group in 11 years and barring the fact that it’s been nigh impossible to predict the machinations behind White’s own creative internal clock, the timing for him to return to more straightforward rock territory is impeccable.
White has effectively split the difference between his last solo album Boarding House Reach’s adventurousness and the band’s past trad-classic rock trappings, the results coming across as appealingly low-stakes. After a series of solo albums that, even at their strongest moments, possessed a nervy atmosphere not unlike grinding one’s teeth, Help Us Stranger is comparatively loose and limber, making for the most collection of songs White’s released in years.
Credit is due to Benson, who as with 2006’s Broken Boy Soldiers and the 2008 quick-turnaround Consolers of the Lonely shares writing credits with White on almost every Help Me Stranger track. Just like Consolers, the sole song he doesn’t is a cover; this time around it’s a rollicking take on psych-pop shaman Donovan’s “Hey Gyp(Dig The Slowness).” But That’s pretty much the only element that Help Me Stranger shares with Consolers; while the latter sagged from an overlong run time, the Raconteurs’ latest is a comparatively lean and mean 41 minutes, with brisk arrangements and more than a few grin-inducing breakdowns such as the double-time frenzy that closes out the boys-in-the-band opener “Bored And Razed.”
There’s a distinctly stoned silliness to parts of Help Me Stranger, none more evident than on the “Misty Mountain Hop”-ping “Only Child,” in which White sings about a “prodigal son” who’s “come back home again to get his laundry done.” Otherwise, the playfulness streaked across this album is mostly of the musical variety, like the multi-tracked vocals dotting the verse structure on “Don’t Bother Me” or the Tell-tale Heart-esque pulse that courses through “Now That You’re Gone.” There are guitar solos packed into nearly every empty corner of this thing, and plenty of the aggressively hammered piano lines that were so prevalent on Boarding House Reach, the latter playing much more enjoyably to the ears than on that record.
Suffice to say, if none of these sonic elements or the idea of four guys bashing out melodic rock music that nonetheless treads familiar ground — sound appealing to you, then you’re probably better off listening to nearly anything else. But the lack of formal innovation on Help Me Stranger packs its own odd appeal, especially when the old tricks are so capably performed. “Live A Lie” is straight-ahead Motor City garage rock that, ironically, bears some resemblance to once-White nemesis the Von Bondies’ “C’mon C’mon”; the guitar riff that kicks open on “Somedays (I Don’t Feel Like Trying)” recalls Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Happy Gilmore-closing “Tuesday’s Gone,” its midsection breaking into a gooey Beatles-esque breakdown.
Such callbacks to classic rock’s, er, classics inevitably bring to mind Greta Van Fleet, that shaggy-haired band of industry-beloved youngsters who’ve gained equal parts fame and critical consternation for joylessly regurgitating the entire Led Zeppelin catalog But there’s nothing that White and Benson have cooked up on Help Me Stranger that sounds like genre-reliant clock-punching; instead, they make playing around in the classic-rock sandbox sound like so much fun that you have to wonder why it took them eleven years to get back in the habit together. Hopefully, next time around they’ll make a point of getting together again sooner.
The Fat Angel Sings 