Old Crow Medicine offers serious tonic of songs
Due to the group’s name, good-timey tempos and comically frantic vocals, Old Crow Medicine Show can be mistaken for a hee-hawing string band not to be taken seriously. All of which makes the new album from the group based in Nashville, Tennessee, deceptive in its delights.
“Paint This Town” is indeed a party starter, but there are also powerful songs about racism, drugs, the abolitionist movement, environmental degradation and the Mississippi flag. Versatile frontman Ketch Secor’s distinctive delivery fits the material, whether his approach is crazed, comedic or conscientious. It turns out Secor can sound a lot like Joe Strummer, and some of the subject matter is Clash-worthy.
“Painkiller” captures the desperation of addiction, and “Used To Be a Mountain” turns angry as it describes an abused landscape. “DeFord Rides
Again,” sung by drummer Jerry Pentecost, pays tribute to pioneering but long-forgotten Black country music artist DeFord Bailey.
While the band delivers those tunes at a furious pace, “New Mississippi Flag” is a bold ballad that movingly summarizes the state’s complicated history in three minutes as it recalls “rattling chains” and those “who died on the road to change.”
Old Crow does find time for fun. Secor is delightfully hammy singing about divorce on “Bombs Away,” and the album opens and closes with joyful foot-stompers. This medicine show’s passion and energy are a potent tonic, especially on songs about right and wrong. — Steven Wine, Associated Press
There’s a sense of
of“A urgency in the lyrics Walk Around the Sun,” a hidden gem of a countryAmericana project by a singer-songwriter known previously as the singer in a brassy French Quarter busker band called Tuba Skinny.
It starts to make sense when you know her back story. Erika Lewis learned in 2020 that she needed surgery that had the potential to damage her vocal cords. A friend urged the singer to record some songs she’d been working on before she had the operation. Things ended happily
Erika Lewis (Independent)
when the surgery went well, her voice intact.
The album she recorded in the meantime is a revelation. The 11 songs Lewis wrote soar not just on the loveliness of her voice but on the emotional intensity of meditations on lost love and the preciousness of time.
The songs range in style from pure helpings of country in the manner of Patsy Cline to songs with more drive that still manage to be calming. In the adventurously melodic “Wild Thing,” for example, Lewis works territory that calls the best work of Chris Isaak to mind.
On “Thief and a Liar,” she warbles beautifully in the style Cline made famous, and on “Love Song,” a somber fiddle leads her through a heartbreaking take on lost love so vivid that you feel like you are hovering overhead as she sits on the levee drinking alone.
“Mighty Mississippi bring my heart back to me,” Lewis sings. “Say a little prayer and don’t float out to sea.”
It’s that kind of aching urgency that animates an album composed and put together in the face of doubts about whether she’d sing again. It’s music that’s built to last. — Scott Stroud, Associated Press
J. Spaceman has delivered another masterpiece. The multitalented musician (whose real name is Jason Pierce) is operating at the height of his space-rock powers on “Everything Was Beautiful.”
It’s a gorgeous and moving suite of orchestral pop, towering rock and intergalactic sounds, sewn together in furious yet meticulous fashion by the always adventurous Spaceman and his fellow musical travelers in the band Spiritualized.
The new album — Spiritualized’s ninth overall — is overflowing with wildness and wonder, tension and turmoil, and every song seems to evoke new emotions and feelings. It’s the rare record that changes course on a regular basis and yet still manages to come across as totally coherent.
“Everything Was Beautiful” should be considered an early frontrunner for best album of 2022.