THE BELIEVERS – LUCKY YOU           CORAZONG RECORDS

Craig Aspen and Cyd Frazzini met seven years ago in bar in Seattle, brought together by their love for old school country music. Prior to becoming a Believer, Craig Aspen moved between New York City and New Orleans writing songs by day and bar-tending by night. Cyd Frazzini left her home in Denver, Colorado, and began performing in rock bands until she was re-introduced to bluegrass music and became determined to pursue and learn more about the Appalachian style and its influences on American folk music. Within weeks of meeting, Aspen and Frazzini were writing and recording songs and soon produced two critically acclaimed albums. As The Believers they have toured extensively throughout USA, UK and Europe, living for a couple of years in Nashville, and have now made their first for CoraZong Records. Co-produced with Steve Adamek and mastered by the TwangTrust’s Ray Kennedy, who produced albums for Steve Earle and Lucinda Williams amongst others. Lucky You effortlessly blends rock, country music and pop hooks while keeping one foot firmly planted in American roots. Highlights include the punchy opening title track, the rootsy Higher Ground, You’ve Got Another Thing Comin’, the beautiful Read It & Weep, Who’s Your Baby Now, the irresistible Ring, Ring, Ring, The Day the Circus Left Town and a gorgeous bonus track, Long Way to Heaven. Influenced by the likes of Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris, the Believers’ fine song-writing and assured harmonies also bring to mind Fleetwood Mac at their most convincing.

KATHLEEN EDWARDS – ASKING FOR FLOWERS       ZOE CDZOE 1115

The acclaimed Canadian singer-songwriter Kathleen Edwards was born in Ottawa, Ontario, in 1978. Her attractive blend of country, folk and pop has made her a rising star on the alt country music scene and Asking for Flowers is her third studio album to date. It features eleven new songs, all written by Edwards, and finds her performing at the peak of her creative powers, supported by a group of excellent backing musicians, including keyboardist Benmont Tench from The Heartbreakers, drummer Don Heffington, bassist Bob Glaub, guitarist Colin Cripps and pedal steel master Greg Leisz. The songs tell indelible, clear-eyed stories of hope and resignation, humour and death, unconditional love and brazen inequality. Standout tracks include the title song about a beleaguered wife (‘Don't tell me you’re too tired, 10 years I’ve been working nights’), The Cheapest Key (in which many bridges are angrily burned), the controversial Alicia Ross, I Make The Dough, You Get The Glory, the poignant Oil Man’s War, Run, the driving Oh Canada and Scared At Night. Sounding at times like a cross between Lucinda Williams, Tom Petty and fellow-Canadian Neil Young, Kathleen Edwards bravely tells it like it is, with real emotion and an underlying fragility that makes her bittersweet music all the more convincing. Asking for Flowers, which she co-produced with Jim Scott, is her most accomplished album yet, revealing an artist who is reaching maturity as both songwriter and singer. Highly recommended.

UNCLE EARL – WATERLOO, TENNESSEE         ROUNDER 1161-0577-2

The all-women American band  Uncle Earl was formed by KC Groves (mandolin, guitar and vocals) and Jo Serrapere, who has since left to pursue a solo career as a songwriter. The current line-up includes KC Groves, Abigail Washburn (banjo and vocals), Rayna Gellert (fiddle and vocals) and Kristin Andreassen (guitar, fiddle, banjo ukelele, vocals and clogging). The band’s old-time music sound has profound echoes of the rural Americana and this new album, Waterloo, Tennessee, is marked by a grandly elegant sense of loss; the breaths of something wistful escaping, bloodied but unbeaten, from the throes of a dying European empire. The music points toward the roots of stringband music (Scotch-Irish ballads, Celtic fiddle tunes, the blues), but by including original material and opening their sound to an array of influences past and present, Uncle Earl arrive at something haunting and timeless, yet instantly appealing and accessible. Waterloo, Tennessee was produced by rock legend John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin and the album’s standout tracks include the traditional fiddle tune Black-Eyed Susie, The Last Goodbye, the beautiful One True, Wish I Had My Time Again (a traditional song taken at breakneck speed), the delicate My Little Carpenter, the irresistible Sisters of the Road, D & P Blues (Drinking and Promiscuity), The Birds Were Singing of You, Bob Dylan’s Wallflower and the bittersweet I May Never. Guest musicians include Erin Youngberg, John Paul Jones, Eric Thorin and Gillian Welch. The g’Earls are in great form and their winning contemporary take on old-time music is artfully reflected in this collection of traditional and original songs. Highly recommended.

GILLIAN WELCH – SOUL JOURNEY             ACONY 50466 6868 2

Singer-songwriter Gillian Welch was born in New York City in 1967 and moved to Los Angeles at the age of four with her adoptive family. By the age of seven, she had learned to play the guitar and later discovered bluegrass music while studying at the University of California in Santa Cruz. Her eclectic musical style combines elements of bluegrass, traditional country, Americana, old time string band music and folk into a rustic blend that she calls ‘American Primitive’. All of her recordings feature the close-harmonies and unconventional guitar work of her long-time musical partner, David Rawlings. Gillian Welch is perhaps best known for her work on the hugely successful soundtrack of the Coen Brothers film O Brother, Where Art Thou? - in which she also had a cameo as a girl in a record store trying to buy a copy of the Soggy Bottom Boys’ recording of  Man of Constant Sorrow. This uncompromising musical renegade with four critically acclaimed albums and a Grammy Award writes and performs mostly with David Rawlings. The duo’s haunting songs are like rock and roll chamber music, with two acoustic guitars and voices blended together, and their third album, 2001’s TIME (THE REVELATOR) ACONY 50466 6875-2-4 marked a divergence from Americana towards a skeletal kind of rock and roll. Soul Journey finds Welch and Rawlings getting creatively looser, with a back-up band to flesh out the sound. The result is a blend of traditional songs such as Mississippi John Hurt’s classic Make Me a Pallet on Your Floor with self-penned tracks like One Monkey and the exquisite One Little Song. Other highlights include a Band/Neil Young-influenced Wrecking Ball, the unique and the reflective I Had A Real Good Mother And Father. Gillian Welch’s soulful and expressive voice is in fine form on an album that brings warmth and relevance to the American tradition.

EMMYLOU HARRIS – HEARTACHES & HIGHWAYS     RHINO R2 73123

Born in 1947 in Birmingham, Alabama, Emmylou Harris received a scholarship for drama to the University of North Carolina, where she began also to study music, greatly influenced by Joan Baez and Bob Dylan. She released her first record, Gliding Bird, in 1969 and three years later was introduced to Gram Parsons by Chris Hillman of the Byrds. Emmylou began touring and recording as a backup singer for Parsons until his death in 1973. Her first album for Reprise, Pieces of the Sky, began a series of highly successful mid-70s albums on which her sound combined traditional, folk-rock, country and singer/songwriter styles. Heartaches and Highways is the first-ever comprehensive single-disc collection to span her career and features twenty tracks, including the a new recording, The Connection. Highlights include the classics Love Hurts (with Gram Parsons), the elegiac Boulder To Birmingham, Townes Van Zandt’s Pancho And Lefty, a fifties pop hit by the Teddy Bears, To Know Him Is To Love Him (with Dolly Parton and Linda Ronstadt), the gospel style Green Pastures, the traditional Wayfaring Stranger, the a capella beauty of  Calling My Children Home, Gillian Welch’s Orphan Girl, and the lovely  Michaelangelo. With her prolific and wide-ranging output, any compilation of Emmylou Harris’s work is sure be incomplete but this album is the perfect introduction to an artist whose beauty, impeccable song selection and cool, crystalline voice have proved irresistible over more than three decades.

PAULA FRAZER AND TARNATION – NOW IT’S TIME     BIRDMAN BMR 095

Singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Paula Frazer grew up in Sautee Nacoochee, Georgia, and Eureka Springs, Arkansas. Her father was a minister and her mother taught piano and played organ in the church so Paula grew up singing in the church choir and playing piano and guitar. After playing guitar and singing in various bands in Arkansas she went to San Francisco aged 18 started playing in bands such as Pleasant Day, Faith No More (guest guitarist) and Virginia Dare. She started Tarnation in 1991 and put out several records under this name before dropping it in favour of her own for such albums Leave The Sad Things Behind (BIRDMAN BMR078). On her newest recording, Now It’s Time, Paula Frazer reconvenes Tarnation for the first time in ten years. The band consists of Frazer, long-time collaborator Patrick Main (piano) and Jasmyn Wong (drums). With Now It’s Time, Paula Frazer and Tarnation reconnect with their past, presenting an olde tyme sound with whisping swirls of guitars and strings, framing Paula’s sweetly angelic voice. The songs depict loss and sorrow but seek and find solace, warmth and comfort in the act of music-making. The immediacy of the writing and production (it was recorded partly in her classic Victorian house in San Francisco on a 1/4" 8 track tape machine) add a pure and fluid sensibility to Frazer’s beautiful voice. Highlights include the opening track, August’s Song, the sad and beautiful Sleeping Dreams, Pretend (with string quartet), the sumptuous First Sign, Nowhere, and the gently resigned title track. With touches of Patsy Cline, Nick Cave and Joni Mitchell, this is a terrific album by one of the loveliest voices in contemporary alt country music.

LUCINDA WILLIAMS – WEST             LOST HIGHWAY 0602498583487

Three-time Grammy Award winner Lucinda Williams was born in Lake Charles, Louisiana, started playing guitar at the age of twelve. Her first two albums, Ramblin’ (a collection of country and blues covers) and Happy Woman Blues (mainly her own songs) received little attention but after moving to Nashville she gradually started attention for her work as a singer and songwriter of rock, folk and country music. She made a series of acclaimed albums and during Mary Chapin Carpenter recorded a cover of her song, Passionate Kisses, for which Williams received the Grammy for Best Country Song in 1994. Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, released in 1998, broke through into the mainstream when she toured with Bob Dylan. Her latest album, West, is possibly her most personal work to date, in which she channels her emotion and restive energy into a powerful set of songs that touch on both darkness and redemption. At turns strikingly spare and compellingly muscular, the album’s 13 tracks demonstrate her willingness to stretch as a musician and to put herself on the line as a chronicler of life. Highlights include the brilliant opener, Are You Alright (likely to become a future classic), the plaintive Fancy Funeral, Mama You Sweet (reflecting on the loss of a her mother), the angry double-entendres of Come On, and the funkily hypnotic Wrap My Head Around That. Lucinda Williams’s voice is in fine smoky form and she has great support from the likes of guitarist Doug Pettibone, Dylan bassist Tony Garnier, renowned drummer Jim Keltner, jazzman Bill Frisell, keyboard player Bob Burger and violinist Jenny Scheinman (especially effective on the insistent Unsuffer Me). Co-produced by Lucinda Williams with Hal Willner, this is a profoundly moving album by the musician Time Magazine declared ‘America's best songwriter’.

EASY COUNTRY         UNION SQUARE MUSIC EASYCD203

The term ‘country music’ embraces several different genres: the Nashville sound (most popular in the 1960s); bluegrass, a fast mandolin, banjo and fiddle-based music popularised by Bill Monroe and the Foggy Mountain Boys; Western, which encompasses traditional Western ballads and Hollywood cowboy music; Western swing, a sophisticated dance music popularised by Bob Wills; the Bakersfield sound (Buck Owens and Merle Haggard); outlaw country; Cajun; Zydeco; gospel; oldtime (generally pre-1930 folk music); honky tonk; Appalachian; rockabilly; neotraditional country and jug band. Each style has its unique rhythms and chord structures, though many songs have been adapted to the different country styles. Vernon Dalhart was the first country singer to have a nationwide hit (May 1924, with ‘The Wreck of Old 97’) and modern country music was greatly influenced by Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family. In the 1990s a new form emerged, sometimes known as alternative country, neotraditional, or ‘insurgent country’. This richly varied compilation takes in the best of traditional country artists and contemporary performers who have so imaginatively developed the genre. From Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams, through Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton and Willie Nelson, up to Emmylou Harris, Lonestar and Ryan Adams, Easy Country’s songs all share a deeply resonant honesty. The 45 well-chosen tracks on this excellent three-album box set feature some of the finest country music ever recorded and show why this vibrant form of music remains so  popular. Highly recommended, especially to anyone yet to be convinced that country music is for them.

LIZ ZORN - THE TRUTH ABOUT ME         DOO BUG RECORDS 5648-1

This stylish debut album by the painter, multi-media artist and poet Liz Zorn was two years in the making. It’s an eclectic mix of folk/blues and adult alternative music that shows the influence of such contemorary songwriters as Lucinda Williams and Patty Griffin. All the songs were written by Zorn, who lives in Morrow, Ohio. She also produced the record and plays small body Martin Acoustic and Liberty Resonator guitars. The highly distinctive sound was achieved by meticulously working in layers of guitar and vocals. Rock and country music are fused with blues and jazz to produce a winning brand of Americana. The singer went through around two hundred songs to come up with the eleven on this album. Standout tracks apart from the title song include Cold Black Night, the bluesy Giddy Up Baby, Knife to the Bone (a spare and brutally honest response to abuse), and the wonderfully plaintive So Long. Expressive vocals throughout, sometimes shaded with echo and ambient sounds, take the listener on an emotional journey filled with delightful surprises.