Mike Went West put Hometown by The Rural Alberta Advantage on his best albums of 2008 list. I was intrigued by their name–as cheesy as that sounds–but the name led me to their music, so all is good.
MWW says the Toronto-based group “is one of the best new bands I’ve heard in a long time.”
Here is the MySpace description the band provides:
The Rural Alberta Advantage play indie-rock folk songs about hometowns and heartbreak, born out of images from growing up in Central and Northern Alberta. They sing about summers in the Rockies and winters on the farm, ice breakups in the spring time and the oil boom’s charm, the mine workers on compressed, the equally depressed, the city’s slow growth and the country’s wild rose, but mostly the songs just try to embrace the advantage of growing up in Alberta.
Excellent. I want to feel the place a band comes from and if the band is supremely talented I do feel it. Take America, The Eagles or Steely Dan–I instantly hear Los Angeles (and the perfect production of LA studios when one of their songs comes on the radio). But The Rural Alberta Advantage isn’t about that, thankfully. Their music is the kind of stripped down, unpretentious folk-inspired pop one might listen to with friends around a campfire in Western Canada.
“Diana Jones writes songs which she sings in such a haunting high lonesome that one can’t help but wonder if she isn’t the lost daughter of the Carter Family.” -Ann Patchett, New York Times
One of Americana music’s biggest champions, Songs:Illinois introduced me to yet another special singer-songwriter living in Nashville. Her name is Diana Jones.
Diana’s new release Better Times Will Come will be released on Proper Records later this month. Guest artists on the record include Nanci Griffith, Betty Elders, Mary Gauthier and Ketch Secor.
Chicagoan Andrew Bird is featured in today’s NYT Sunday Magazine. I like how the critic describes Bird’s music.
Bird’s sound is not easy to categorize. His songs are swelling and orchestral, the legacy of years spent studying classical violin at Northwestern University’s prestigious conservatory and elsewhere. He has been compared with the Irish rock singer Damien Rice, but Bird’s sound is also distinctly American, part of a new wave of folk — free folk, psych folk or freak folk, as it has variously been called — that has grown in popularity in recent years. His songs have a pastoral, homespun feel, but they also have a darkness and emotional complexity not typically associated with folk rock.
Bird’s new album, “Noble Beast” will be released Jan. 20 on Fat Possum. If his last effort, “Armchair Apocrypha,” released in 2007, is any indication, Bird’s fans have something grand to look forward to.
I’m pretty proud of my Best of 2008 Mixtape that I sent out to nine friends today (see previous post). But Merge Records is giving me a run for the money with their own 2008 Sampler.
Here’s the lineup:
1. Slipped Dissolved and Loosed by Lambchop
2. Life Like by The Rosebuds
3. Dark Leaves Form a Thread by Destroyer
4. All the Lost Souls Welcome You to San Francisco by American Music Club
5. Cape Canaveral by Conor Oberst
6. I Don’t Feel Young by Wye Oak
7. Warm Rising Sun by Radar Bros.
8. Auctioneer by The Broken West
9. Some Small History by Portastatic
10. She’s Fetching by Big Dipper
11. Why Do You Let Me Stay Here? by She & Him
12. Majesty by The Music Tapes
13. Jingle Bells by Julian Koster
You can stream these songs on Merge’s site or register and receive the album as a free download. Offering the download is a smart move by Merge, as the Conor Oberst and Wye Oak albums are the only ones we currently own. After this new sampler sinks in a bit, I’m sure we’ll be tempted to pick up more of these ’08 releases.
Bonus tracks for download here: Lazy Susan and Living in Sin by Oakley Hall (another Merge recording artist, but one that didn’t release an album in 2008. These tracks are from 2006.)
There are plenty “Best of 2008” lists floating around these series of tubes.
My own take on the year is expressed as a mixtape.
Here’s my playlist:
1. “Real As an Animal” by Alejandro Escovedo
2. “Drunken Poet’s Dream” by Hayes Carll
3. “Cheney’s Toy” by James McMurtry
4. “Poor Old Dirt Farmer” by Levon Helm
5. “I Love Your and Buddha Too” by Mason Jennings
6. “Morning Is My Destination” by Tift Merritt
7. “San Francisco B.C.” by Silver Jews
8. “Soldier’s Grin” by Wolf Parade
9. “I Will Possess Your Heart” by Death Cab for Cutie
10. “Keep Your Eyes Ahead” by The Helio Sequence
11.”Two Daughters and a Beautiful Wife” by Drive-By Truckers
12. “Forty Days and Forty Nights” by Donna the Buffalo
13. “Real Love” by Lucinda Williams
Let me know if you’d like a copy. I’ll burn one and send it to you.
While leafing through the current edition of Paste this morning, I came across a full page ad from New West Records. The ad drives readers to LivefromAustinTX.com, a microsite set up to sell DVDs of past Austin City Limits episodes. The label is offering 40 titles from some of the best artists in existence—Lucinda Williams, Steve Earle, Robert Earle Keen, Widespread Panic, John Hiatt, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and many more.
BTW, Paste named Lucinda’s new album, Little Honey, 9th best album of 2008.
We went downtown last night to see Jerry Joseph and the Jackmormons play at Dante’s on SW 3rd and Burnside. It was good to see Jerry open strong with “1936 Jesus” into “Chinese Balls” followed by “Savage Garden.”
note the shoes (Jerry typically plays barefoot)
Jerry hasn’t been performing under the Jackmormons banner for a few years, but that time is now past. Jerry explains:
…we have decided that the moratorium on the Jackmormons name is over, so its the Jackmormons = junior, drizos and myself. no…brad is not dead, he was last spotted at the oregon country fair mumbling something about 2012 and “making the snakes go away”. aside from that unforunate moment, there is no weird political cloak and dagger shit. brad’s and my life have intertwined for the bulk of our 25 year friendship and i’m sure we will see him again soon….but we just felt that the j-mos name is less confusing than the denmark-jack-sometime-stockholm-electric-solo-duo-trio-vessymormons, so we shall be kicking off the the “whatever happend to dragging it out behind the barn and killing it with an axe” tour 09 with some rockies shows and then the NYE run as the Jackmormons.
Jerry’s presence brought out some old friends–I was pleasantly surprised to see Chris Reddish who flew in from Salt Lake and I bumped in to David Warrington, the photog who took the famous Veneta ’82 image that hangs on my wall (and has since 1989, when I purchased a print from him outside the Frost Theatre in Palo Alto).
Dick Cavett: I heard you use the expression “electric church” as an ambition you had, was this speaking metaphorically or poetically or do you really want to…?
Jimi Hendrix: It’s just a belief that I have. We do use electric guitars. Everything you know is electrified now days, therefore the belief comes through the electricity to the people. That’s why we play so loud. Because it doesn’t actually hit through the eardrums like most groups do now days. They say we’re gonna play loud too, ’cause they’re playin’ loud. And they got this real shrill sound, you know, that’s really hard. We play for our sound to go inside the soul of the person, actually, you know. And see if they can awaken some kind of thing in their minds, you know, ’cause there’s so many sleeping people.
