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Ha Ha Tonka, Lessons

2013 | Label: Bloodshot Records

By Annie Zaleski eMusic Contributor

09.27.13 Ha Ha Tonka’s music has always been richly steeped in Americana, folk and bluegrass. But on Lessons, the Southern Missouri quartet’s fourth and most diverse full-length, these genres are starting points. The familiar stylistic signifiers — four-part harmonies, prickly mandolin, stomping acoustic guitar — merely add texture to songs that, at various points, conjure Shearwater’s strummy introspection (“Staring At The End Of Our Lives”), Spoon’s compact pop (the bass-heavy, wrinkled title track) and Wilco’s rugged alt-country (“Pied Pipers”). Whimsical piano, plush organ and jagged electric guitar contribute additional color.

Alongside this… more »

The Louvin Brothers, Satan Is Real

1996 | Label: CAPITOL NASHVILLE

By Andrew Mueller eMusic Contributor

09.03.13 It’s a minor tragedy of the internet age that millions will have been introduced to this astonishing album as a joke. The cover of Satan Is Real, which features Charles and Ira Louvin, clad in gleaming white suits, pleading melodramatically before a clearly home-made plywood Lord of Darkness, features regularly on those much-forwarded lists of gauche and ill-considered sleeve art.

The arch chuckling is misguided. The Louvins were Christians — devout to the point of being terrified — who grew up in northern Alabama and began recording during the 1950s, creating… more »

Neko Case, The Worse Things Get, The Harder I Fight, The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You

2013 | Label: Anti/Epitaph

By Stephen M. Deusner eMusic Contributor

09.03.13 Neko Case has spent the last 15 years perfecting both a dark strain of alt-country and a lyrical style that rejects songwriting conventions in order to build up wholly new personal mythologies. As her songs have grown moodier and more cinematic, Case has become less willing to state anything outright, instead finding ever more circuitous routes around her subjects. Hers is a defiantly impressionistic style, both withholding and revealing, and it reaches a peak on her latest album, The Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight, the Harder I Fight,… more »

Laura Veirs, Warp and Weft

2013 | Label: Raven Marching Band / Redeye

By Hilary Saunders eMusic Contributor

08.20.13 The warp and weft, the two over-under types of knitting technique, take special narrative direction on Portland-based songstress Laura Veirs’s new album. Veirs recorded Warp and Weft while she was eight months pregnant with her second child, and her husband and longtime collaborator Tucker Martine later produced the 12-track release. As such, themes of love and loss, protection and ultimate surrender weave their way throughout Warp and Weft, with Veirs’s own motherhood experiences serving as the connecting thread on her ninth LP.

The album’s songs are both surprisingly realistic — paying… more »