Reviews

Midwest band The Barley Jacks do things a little differently. Their third album, Coming Down the Mountain, is out—10 years after their previous album.  To get the album, The Barley Jacks joined a growing number of musicians and crowdfunded the work. At the time this review was written, Coming Down the Mountain had brought in…

The growing number of performers writing songs and developing their own sound within bluegrass and elsewhere face a couple of choices when preserving those carefully nurtured songs beyond a simple smartphone video or voice memo. If you want to overdub instrumental or vocal tracks, there’re several choices, including doing your overdubs and mixing directly on…

Darol Anger’s unmistakable fiddle tone has graced a huge variety of recording projects from Dawg music to bluegrass to jazz and a few stops in-between. A founding member of the David Grisman Quintet, Anger’s distinctive sound, produced on his five-string violin, has dueled melodically with virtually every contemporary bluegrass master.      His latest project,…

On their new CD, Wild Mountain Honey, Riverbend steers a course sticking close to the traditional bluegrass found on their earlier disc. Populated with strong (mostly) covers of traditional bluegrass tunes from Mac Wiseman, the Delmore Brothers, Bill Monroe and more, Riverbend blends classic and contemporary influences into a strong original sound.     The…

Every once in a while, in the greater bluegrass world, you come across a new album that sounds fresh and feels good and that is the case for the new release Flyin’ High by The Wooks.  Based out of Lexington, KY, and Nashville, the Wooks are made up of bluegrass veteran CJ Cain on guitar…

It is hard not to think of Darren Nicholson’s sense of humor not far into his latest solo album, Man on a Mission.  The opening bars of the first song, “Love is War,” start with hard driving banjo and fiddle and the sound Nicholson is known for with Balsam Range and his main side-gig, the…