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Cold Specks, I Predict A Graceful Expulsion

2012 | Label: MUTE

05.23.12 "Cross your heart and remember me, the good father and the bad seed," London-based songstress Al Spx sings on the opening track of her debut, I Predict A Graceful Expulsion. A sea away from her Toronto, Canada, home, it's difficult to believe that Spx — who refuses to use her real name out of respect for her God-fearing, disapproving family — is writing from a place of anything less than gut-wrenching sincerity.

Slung somewhere between Bill Callahan's folk nihilism and Flannery O'Connor's down and dirty spirituality, I Predict A Graceful Expulsion is an extended dalliance with darkness. As though weaving a gospel for the unbelieving, Spx fills her "doom soul" with tales of fractured families, weary travels, and what feels like… more »

Willie Nelson, Heroes

2012 | Label: Legacy Recordings

05.15.12 With his 79th birthday behind him, Willie Nelson is pondering his mortality on Heroes. A duet with fellow septuagenarian Merle Haggard on ruminative opener "A Horse Called Music" examines memory and loss. And then follows a meditation on death, "Roll Me Up & Smoke Me When I Die," sung with Kris Kristofferson, Jamey Johnson and uh…Snoop Dogg?! OK, OK, so somber isn't Willie's way and Heroes shows he still has plenty of crackling guitar playing and cackling lyrical play left in him. "I ain't leaving, so don't sit around and cry," he says on this spry boot-scooter, as he and Snoop pass the chorus back and forth between them like a joi — uh…microphone. Two songs on, Willie notes "I… more »

Pete Seeger, The Complete Bowdoin College Concert, 1960

2012 | Label: Smithsonian Folkways

04.23.12 When he took the stage on the night of this nearly two-hour performance, Pete Seeger was less than halfway through a life that has now stretched beyond 90 years. He'd been indicted three years prior for contempt of Congress after refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee; his response, in part, was to start booking concerts at schools across America, including this one at a small college in Brunswick, Maine. It was broadcast by local radio station WBOR, and more than half a century later, it stands as a rare complete-concert recording of the era, documenting much of what we now take for granted as the Seeger legacy. Performances include his landmark instrumental "Living in the Country," immortalized… more »

Loudon Wainwright III, Older Than My Old Man Now

2012 | Label: 2nd Story Sound Records / Redeye

04.17.12 Although it's been 40 years since he recorded "Dead Skunk," the novelty-music cloud still hangs heavy over Loudon Wainwright III. But the humor on Older Than My Old Man now is of the gallows variety, as Wainwright faces mortality with a fatalistic grin.

Inspired by Wainwright's 64th birthday — one more than his father, a columnist for Life magazine, enjoyed — Older surveys the arc of the singer-songwriter's life: the wreckage of the past, the chaotic jumble of the present, and the inevitable end of the line. Given that Wainwright's on his third marriage and he's publicly, and musically, feuded with his singing offspring Rufus and Martha, the album is suffused with melancholy and regret, but it's also tinged with hope,… more »