Achy Carolina Story makes stellar debut

Davies’ sequel disappoints

C“Lay Your Head Down” (Black River Americana) Ben Roberts comes from Arkansas, his wife Emily is from South Dakota, and they met in Memphis a decade ago. But Nashville was always their destiny.

The couple’s debut album, “Lay Your Head Down,” pulsates with achy, heartfelt sentiment, delivered in tender harmony against a warmly pastoral background.

For nearly 10 years, the duo said yes to every gig request, performing in nursing homes, churches and bars. The response was encouraging, but success was not immediate.

Still, talent this big is hard to keep down. Several odd jobs and two babies later, it landed them a record deal.

On the opening title cut, a mournful train whistle of a harmonica lays the groundwork for Ben plaintive tenor.

“Springtime came with a vengeance this year, the river rose high, the water ain’t clear,” he sings in words composed on the banks of the Cumberland River.

But it isn’t until Emily adds harmony on the second verse that the voltage of their voices joined together takes command.

It’s possible, maybe even probable, that these gentle songs won’t rise to the top of the country charts. But they will find their way onto many a mellow playlist. And if they had emerged under the names of, say, Tim McGraw and Faith Hill, surely Nashville would have dropped to its knees.

The thing is, this isn’t the kind of music that’s written with stardom in mind. These songs feel like they had to come out.

Roberts

By Scott Stroud

“Our Country: Americana Act II” (Sony Legacy)

Like most sequels, Ray Davies’ “Our Country: Americana Act II” doesn’t live up to the original.

The Kinks co-founder’s latest effort is a followup to last year’s “Americana,” a standout record that marked his first solo effort of original material in nearly a decade. But instead of a sequel taking things in a new direction, the 19-track “Americana Act II” feels more like a rehash with material that’s not as strong as the original.

Part of the problem is that Davies follows the same format as “Americana”: new songs mixed with spoken word excerpts from his 2013 memoir and reinterpretations of old tunes like “Oklahoma U.S.A.” from the Kinks’ seminal 1971 album, “Muswell Hillbillies.”

Where the approach felt fresh on “Americana,” this time around it just feels like a retread.

On both records, Davies explores his journey through America. It’s a fascinating story, to be sure, and the American alt-country band from Minnesota, the Jayhawks, once again provide exceptional backing for the distinctly British Davies.

Let’s hope the next time Davies is in a less nostalgic mood, just like he sings in the last verse of the last song on “Americana Act II”: “Don’t do it again.”

“Uniform Distortion” My Morning Jacket frontman Jim James offers his musings on love, life and the hazards of our social media-driven modern world on his fourth solo record, the rocking “Uniform Distortion.”

With driving guitar riffs and catchy hooks combined with his signature soaring vocals, James delivers an utterly engaging, hard-charging, straightahead record that almost feels like a throwback to a different era while also being very much current.

Or, as he sings on “Out of Time”: “I’m either behind the times or ahead of the times or maybe I’m just out of time, out of luck.” It’s hard not to get sucked in. Who can’t relate to the first single, “Just a Fool,” when James sings, “Just a fool getting by/ Just a fool doing all right.”

On “Throwback,” James mixes nostalgia for a world before we were all connected, whether we like it or not, through our social media accounts.

“Scroll back in time through your account/ Watch your face grow younger as real time runs out/Throwback Thursday to the way that it was/ When we were young,” he sings.

The record’s title, “Uniform Distortion,” couples perfectly with the cover image taken from a 1971 “Whole Earth Catalog” showing a person hidden behind what appears to be a blinding light. Considered together with the music, it sends the message that all of us, and everything around us, is distorted.

The question James grapples with, and that listeners are left to ponder, is what are we going to do about it?

NASHVILLE, Tenn:

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(ATO Records)

It was only a matter of time, just a couple of months actually, before a preteen boy captured in a viral video yodeling in a Walmart put out a record.

Mason Ramsey, the adorable 11-year-old whose version of a Hank Williams classic has been watched more than 50 million times on YouTube and spawned multiple remixes, will put out his first album on July 20.

Titled “Famous,” the EP includes a mix of new songs and country classics, including the song that made Mason an overnight Internet sensation, “Lovesick Blues.”

Raised in the small town of Golconda, Illinois, Ramsey said his grandfather taught him to sing when he was 3 years old and he started performing at nursing homes, restaurants and fairs. “When I started to sing, I guess you could say it was good for a 3-year-old,” Ramsey said in a telephone interview.

But it took him weeks to discover that his impromptu Walmart performance had gone viral because his family didn’t have Internet access at their home. They got a call from producers with “The Ellen Show,” and he was flown to Los Angeles — his first-ever plane ride — to be a guest on the show. (AP)