Tess Brunet’s debut album under the Au Ras Au Ras moniker is a feat of quiet determination. The phrase “au ras au ras” is Cajun French for “equal footing” and Brunet comes off as a partner in a slow dance with the songs. They are possessed of a beguiling tempo verging on the languid, a [...]
Wye Oak, the Baltimore indie rock duo named for a 460-year old tree in their home state of Maryland, give off an appropriate balance of rooted strength and breezy pliability. They began as stylistic seedlings from a lineage of other bands, the product of, say, the Police’s Ghost in the Machine passed down through Yo [...]
Gillian Welch is the truest kind of cool, the kind that lingers in the background letting the hotshots and attention hogs perform their circus acts and press junkets and media campaigns and when their dizzying dust settles, she steps back up to the mic and shows everybody how it’s done. Her release schedule is a [...]
We may be at the point where we can stop referring to Jason Isbell as a former member of Drive-By Truckers. Here We Rest, his third studio album as a solo artist, establishes Isbell as an artist and bandleader with his own nuanced artistic vision. The album takes its name from his home state of [...]
Sax player Dickie Landry left south Louisiana in 1969 to push music farther than he could back home as a member of the horn section for the Swing Kings. A couple key connections landed him at the apartment of Philip Glass, who was still working on the foundations of the clumsily named “minimalism” that would [...]
What much of 1980s nostalgia fails to acknowledge is that there was more to new wave than funny clothes and synthesizers. New wave was, in ways, a means of creating rock stars out of ourselves, a means for misfits to meet pop music and punk rock halfway. The Cold was New Orleans’ embodiment of that [...]
The only time I thought I was in the presence of superheroes was in the late ’90s at a Guitar Wolf show. The trio appeared suddenly on stage with a thunderclap coming from Drum Wolf on the risers. The late Bass Wolf stood stage left, sneering over a low, diesel-powered throb generated by his instrument [...]
“Folktronica” sounds like the worst idea on paper and yet is one of the best in reality. It is a bending of the infinite entrainment engine of electronic music toward the more sylvan, contemplative end of things, like trip-hop without being so self-consciously noir. Gothenburg, Sweden’s José González (born in Argentina, if you were curious) [...]
I still wasn’t convinced Gordon Gano, singer of my favorite band of my youth, Violent Femmes, was really going to play with my favorite Cajun group, Lost Bayou Ramblers, until the fiddles started playing the “Blister in the Sun” riff right there before me at the Blue Moon in Lafayette. Those quarter-century-old folk-punk tunes mix [...]
Under the ragged flag of the Elephant 6 Recording Company, some of the most enduring and endearing music of the 1990s was crafted by Neutral Milk Hotel, The Apples in Stereo, Of Montreal, and countless other loosely defined projects born in a nebulous cloud of creativity and friendship that started in Ruston, Louisiana, then took [...]
