“Thought I was alone in the world,” Jason Isbell sings in the first lines of the swirling seven-minute prog-roots rocker “What’ve I Done to Help,” before adding, “until my memories gathered ’round me in the night.” There’s a reason Isbell chose to open Reunions, his seventh album, with the image …
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A California hardcore kid who moved to North Carolina about 20 years ago to pursue a rootsier strain of self-discovering earnestness, country-soul singer-songwriter MC Taylor is the kind of nice guy you want to root for. How nice? His sixth LP as the leader of Hiss Golden Messenger opens with …
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Hollywood Vampires may be a supergroup, but their self-titled 2015 debut album was essentially a souped-up showcase for frontman Alice Cooper. Aerosmith’s Joe Perry, Johnny Depp, and the band provided a hard-rocking foundation for Cooper to pay tribute to what he called his “dead, drunk friends” with covers of the …
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Duff McKagan, Guns N’ Roses’ second-best singer (or is it third-best? where’s Izzy?), gets woke on his mellow new solo album. Amid twanging steel guitars, gospel backup singers and fiddle filigrees, he variously addresses America’s opioid epidemic, school shootings, sexual assault, homelessness and his own transgressions, but it never feels …
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This second LP since George Strait’s retirement from touring — his 30th studio LP — is a trip back to when country radio didn’t suck as a rule: Eighties pop shine cut with pedal steel/fiddle poetry, Texas swing, cantina blues and achingly-crooned nostalgia that generally doesn’t feel hard sell, even …
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