There are plenty of reasons other than the Winter Olympics to set your sights on the second-largest country in the world right now. Canadian contributions to the indie music scene have always been healthy, but in the last decade they’ve become downright probiotic. Basia Bulat’s holistic presence was first felt two years ago when her [...]

The music of Minor Kingdom (Kristian Melom) delivers dense, melodic orchestration that compliments his whimsical tunes and spacious soundscapes. The album, which was recorded over the course of two years at a multitude of intimate and unique locations, allowed for collaboration with some of Minneapolis’s most talented musicians. Tracking most of the songs himself, Kristian [...]

A thickset forest, a murky attic, a neutral river running indifferently next to a log cabin, and the eclipsed back room in every aloof guitar shop. Such is the music of Minor Kingdom’s mastermind Kristian Melom, a well-bearded, Minnesota-based singer-songwriter whose debut record My Back Will Bend strives for the same sort of disaffiliation rust-folk [...]

Basia Bulat’s Heart of My Own, “folk music from the hills,” is aptly titled as it is pure, untarnished, and from the heart. Bulat’s soulful ballads of heartache and heartbreak filtered through a wailing, strong, classic female voice (dare I compare her to Joni Mitchell?) make this album one for the charts.

“Something, Somewhere, Sometime” is from the forthcoming Dear Companion, to be released on February 16, 2010 on Sub Pop, a collaboration between three Kentucky musicians: the songs are written and performed by Ben Sollee and Daniel Martin Moore, and produced by and featuring Yim Yames of My Morning Jacket and Monsters of Folk. Recorded in [...]

Raised on 20 wooded acres in Western Massachusetts, artist Meghan Wolf often found herself lost to the quiet of the forest and the rhythms of the natural world.
“Walking and water bring melodies and words to the surface for me,” she says. “When I was a kid, I would spend hours wandering the woods and making [...]

Bruler Bruler is a mellow, inoffensive, and slightly twangy collection of female singer-songwriter folk music. If you’re lazy, you can stop reading this review now. Seriously. Bruler Bruler is a truly unremarkable album. The country influence is nice, and Torrisi’s vocals are always on the mark along the lines of a Norah Jones-type singer, but [...]

Every so often a singer-songwriter comes along who simultaneously blazes his own path and pays homage to his predecessors. Nathan Xander fits this role perfectly. He blends the lyrical senses of a poetic Bob Dylan with the musical style of Two Gallants and vocal stylings of Jeff Tweedy. The music blends alt-country hooks with the [...]

Midwestern folk singer Frank Schweikhardt’s album Life But No More is simply an album that exists. It adds nothing to the genre. Each and every one of the album’s 39 minutes sounds exactly alike with the same monotone vocals piled on over the same strummed chords with nearly the same tempo for the entire record. [...]

So let’s face it — Nashville is a place for music. You don’t have to believe me, but it’s true. So if you’re an artist and you’re playing a show in Nashville, then what do you do to keep your voice from drowning among the thousands of others belting, rasping, screaming, and rocking some serious [...]

Back in 2006, a group of like-minded artist/musician folks gathered under the cerebellum of Ian Dudley and recorded the self-titled LP The Woods. It was a musical story about a kid with a malfunctioning air conditioning unit that leads him to drift away on the ocean waves and have all kinds of encounters and adventures.
Feeling [...]

To Flogging Molly fans, Nathen Maxwell is the bass player who lends his voice to “Queen Anne’s Revenge,” one of the louder and faster songs by an often loud and fast band. On White Rabbit, a 10-track album of material written over the past 10 years, listeners are exposed to a different side of Maxwell’s [...]

Upon the first pass through Keegan DeWitt’s latest offering, Islands, I began setting various tracks to my unfinished soliloquy-ridden screenplay about an off-beat writer trying to fit in and the girl he just cannot woo. It’s understandable since DeWitt’s M.O. has been scoring essential “mumblecore” films (according to Wikipedia, the artist has scored two of [...]

Mike Doughty and ATO Records offer an MP3 download of “Casper the Friendly Ghost,” originally found on the 1983 release Yip/Jump Music by Texas-based artist/songwriter Daniel Johnston.
Mike says, “Daniel Johnston is one of the few singers out there that’s a real American outsider artist. Genuine folk art,” adding, “He takes a pop cartoon like Casper [...]

Lou Reed once asked, “What becomes a legend most?” No doubt the unfailingly modest Lou Barlow would blanch at being called a “legend.” And yet when you take the long-view, few artists have been as prolific, productive, and influential over the last 20 years. Barlow burst onto the scene as the bass-player in the seminal [...]