Articles

Orchard Creek Band is yet another powerhouse bluegrass ensemble to recently emerge from Colorado’s vibrant and vital bluegrass scene. Though this is the band’s debut outing, the individual members bring a ton of professional experience to their shared endeavor. It’s no slight to Colorado to mention that nearly all the members have musical roots in…

Bonfire Music Group If you’re in a hurry when you get to this review and just want the writer to get to the point, let him save you some time: go ahead and buy All of These Years, the debut album from Steve Thomas and The Time Machine. If it seems to odd to see…

Tiki Parlour Recordings 019 The duo has an unusual name, an uncommon make up, and a catchy, foot-tapping sound that proves irresistible over a 12-song effort. Gabrielle Macrae and Barry Southern are the Horsenecks and Started Out in Town is their third album. It’s a worthy effort. Macrae is a fiddle player from Oregon who…

Abigail Washburn and Bela Fleck bring the kind of missionary zeal and unshakeable confidence to double-banjo albums that Sam I Am brought to his evangelizing for green eggs and ham. The duo’s second full-length recording, Echo In The Valley (2017), is instrumentally sparce— two banjos at any one time, two voices, a pair of dancing…

Mountain Fever Records Amanda Cook was born and raised in Florida and cut her teeth playing with her father in a band called High Cotton. Since then, Cook, in both musical and geographic terms, has made the greater Appalachian and Blue Ridge region her adopted home. Songs such as “West Virginia Coal,” “My Used To…

The publicity photos accompanying this release show Eli West at work in a small country chapel. In one particularly striking photo, he is seated in a pew, bathed in wan sunlight with his head bowed reverentially over his notepad with a microphone and cell phone in front of him. This photo in particular foretells the…