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Music Noir Americana

I’m so glad that Robert Fontenot in OffBeat has again unequivocally given the Deltas the thumbs up. I’ve been thinking about how to characterize this band and independently came up with the idea that Deltaphonic are the musical analog to film noir. This time of year I usually visit Baton Rouge but I’ll have to settle for listening to track…

American Epic

Documentary debuting this evening on PBS — the trailer here. AMERICAN EPIC represents a ten-year odyssey by Allison McGourty, director Bernard MacMahon, musician Duke Erikson, and audio engineer Nicholas Bergh, that involved tracking down countless long forgotten musicians, restoring the music that they recorded and reassembling the technology that created it. Along the way they brought…

See Red: New Deltaphonic

Having spent the day previewing Deltaphonic’s forthcoming release See Red I’m pleased to report that they are very much on form. Given that their last album Texas, Texas set the bar so high, one had to wonder if they could ever approximate that again (this was the bind that Television found themselves in after Marquee Moon).…

Jew of Oklahoma

If you appreciate Kinky Friedman then you’ll certainly enjoy Mark Rubin of Bad Livers fame. The seamless confluence of many styles is an authentic distillation that marks this debut out for serious consideration, shot through with a wonderful self-deprecating sense of humor. The interesting/revealing thing is that given the prevailing (crude and superficial) social ontology, i.e., “basket of deplorables” — Mark would easily…

Scott Billington: producer par excellence

How do you know when a song is finished? This is the key question for a producer — the answer lies with the idea that may best be described as an “intimation,” something that only comes with a deep understanding of a given tradition. Listen to this chat with Scott Billington arguably one of the best recording producers…

The Band

I guess the name couldn’t have been more prescient — THE band! IMHO this is the greatest band of all for many reasons as nicely set out in this documentary (yet another excellent installment to the Classic album series). The three primary and inextricably linked markers of their greatness: 1. indifferent to mainstream musical fashion;…