Alt-country

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
Inspired by jenks' mentioning of 'Factory' by Martha Wainwright on another thread (sublime song)....

I lhave loved so many Americana/alt-country artists in the past, but have totally lost touch with what has been going on over the past five years or so...

Some of my favourites:

Slaid Cleaves - Horseshoe Lounge, One Good Year

Nina Persson - Bluest Eyes in Texas

Emmylou's later stuff

Laura Cantrell (a favourite of John Peel, and can't say fairer than that)

Neko Case - South Tacoma Way (has reduced at least four people I know to tears)

The Guthries - Patsy Cline (with the immortal line, "Patsy Cline is the only one who could understand just how I'm feeling tonight"), Season To Leave

The Handsome Family - So Much Wine
 

Ach!

Turd on the Run
I know nothing about this music, but I was doing some rubbish iLike music quiz on Facebook and Emmylou Harris' 'Wrecking Ball' was on it - iLike that song.
 

Kuma

The Konspirator
Very much looking forward to seeing Neko Case next week. After a bit of a drop off with the last album, she's back on pure, luminous form with the new one..
 

empty mirror

remember the jackalope
yeah, i like smog.
speaking of smog, jim white is one of my favorite drummers ever. dirty three, catpower, bonnie prince billy, nina nastasia----just follow him and you will run into "alt country" (horrible term) done right. amazing to watch him drum----much like rashied ali is all about the beats he doesn't hit, jim white is notable for what he does between hits of the snare or cymbal. he looks like a lizard on a hot rock behind the kit. creepy, otherworldly, slow... yet frenetic. gravitas!
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
I used to be really into a lot of alt-country. Haven't listened to any for ages but some standouts would be:

Bonnie Prince Billy - 'I see a darkness', 'Ease down the road'

Palace - 'Viva last blues', 'Lost blues and other songs' (a good compilation of palace stuff)

Will Oldham seems to be the don at this sort of thing, love him or hate him...'Superwolf' was another good one...


Lambchop - 'Nixon', 'Is a Woman'

Smog - 'Red apple falls' and 'Knock knock', both excellent albums...

Also still quite like Cat Power, Vic Chesnutt, Sparklehorse, David Pajo, Gillian Welch...


Can't really be doing with the Wilco/Uncle tupelo/Jay Farrar axis - boring...


The best, truly 'alternative' (though I can barely stand to use that word) country bands of this ilk would be the Meat Puppets and Gun Club. 'Meat Puppets II' and 'Fire of Love' are both great albums. They get called 'Cow-punk', which I suppose is better than 'alt-country'.

...but yeah, I'm not really into this type of thing any more. I think I'd rather put on Gram Parsons or Neil young nowadays.
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
speaking of smog, jim white is one of my favorite drummers ever. dirty three, catpower, bonnie prince billy, nina nastasia----just follow him and you will run into "alt country" (horrible term) done right. amazing to watch him drum----much like rashied ali is all about the beats he doesn't hit, jim white is notable for what he does between hits of the snare or cymbal. he looks like a lizard on a hot rock behind the kit. creepy, otherworldly, slow... yet frenetic. gravitas!

Seen...Great description of his style that is.

Jim White is an incredible drummer. Saw him play with the Dirty Three a few times and my jaw dropped. A total natural...
 

empty mirror

remember the jackalope
^ agreed on most points there

only ones i have stuck with are smog/callahan and will oldham
i can't even really hear wilco---it is just so flavorless
saw them on their yankee hotel foxtrot tour and was bored out of my mind
rarely the one to act too cool for school but i remember just sitting at the concession stand waiting for it to end...

strangely, i've been into, like, traveling wilburys, when i need to scratch that itch.

that tortoise/bonnie billy record was damn good though.
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
that tortoise/bonnie billy record was damn good though.

Yeah, I really loved the Bruce Springsteen cover on that one. Shit, might have to dig out a few old records this week and see which ones I actually still like and maybe flog the rest!

Maybe after this we should have a proper Country music thread, fuck these geeky revivalists. Johnny Cash and Loretta Lynn!

I think the problem I found with alt-country was that I started to feel a bit like an old man listening to it. The nail in the coffin was when I went to the All tomorrows Parties festival a couple of years back and it was full of young men, old before their time, clapping politely to Joanna Newsome and the like. I thought, fuck, I'm only 25, what the hell am I doing here?
 

zhao

there are no accidents
all that hipster country is for the birds yo!

bonnie prince billy... what a self important pretentious little shit.

wilco seems like as cynical a music-by-committee commercial venture as any major pop act, or at least sounds like it.

i liked cat power for about a year, and can not STAND that shit no more... her voice is all affectation no soul what so ever: more fake country blues for the star bucks crowd.

and some distinction should be made between alt country and folk revival or whatever. a few acts mentioned i would put in latter category, with Akron-Family, Espers, and Devendra (good picks of the bunch)j newsome has something special about her, but again, is folk, not Country.

this girl's album Graceful Ghost, considering her background, ironically sounds very much authentic alt Country (with capital C) and good:

1202.jpg


Grey DeLisle
 
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baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
speaking of smog, jim white is one of my favorite drummers ever. dirty three, catpower, bonnie prince billy, nina nastasia----just follow him and you will run into "alt country" (horrible term) done right. amazing to watch him drum----much like rashied ali is all about the beats he doesn't hit, jim white is notable for what he does between hits of the snare or cymbal. he looks like a lizard on a hot rock behind the kit. creepy, otherworldly, slow... yet frenetic. gravitas!

yeah, alt country is a horrible term. dislike 'americana' even more though!

Ah, and there's also the (Floridian) Jim White who did Still Waters, among other great tracks.

Must say Lambchop send me into a coma - some of the dullest, most polite music ever produced (couple of good songs, but not nearly enough).

I don't think the best of this stuff has anything to do with revivalism or hipsterism or wanting to ape Johnny Cash - it's just a constant strand that runs through American music. And the best stands up there with Gram, which is the biggest compliment of all.
 
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Buick6

too punk to drunk
Without throwing the baby out with the bathwater, alot of the 'indie', like any country, is only as good as the SINGING, so generally sweet female voices work best, thought despite being a talented twat and being more prolific and dudful (though not as all round as AWFUL) as Elton John, RYAN ADAMS is pretty much as good as yr gonna get for all this 'new wave' hipster, fashion spread country or whatever you wanna call it - CHRISTIAN MUSIC?

But you absolutely can't go past the 'OUTLAW COUNTRY' crew, take WILLIE NELSON, esp. that Atlantic era boxset with stuff like SHOTGUN WILIE and PHASES and STAGES, and WAYLON JENNINGS sublime HONKY TONK HEROES...

For those that always thought - like me - 'country' was too 'cheesy' and 'white' and 'Christian' sounding, those records are a good place to maybe start (or end?)...

There is also a label called 'THE MASKED WEASEL' that are releasing raw, bootleg quality recordings of the like of KENNY ROGERS, that are pretty out-there...
 

petergunn

plywood violin
and the best Buck Owens stands up to Gram!

Arms Full of Empty- Buck Owens ...i think Gram was copying Buck way more than he was copying Merle Haggard... i love Gram so much, GP is one of my fav records by anyone, but he def did not come out of nowhere...

i have piles of great 60's country, i need to make a mix... obv major label stuff like Ernest Tubb, but also piles of small label 45's, with some real gems in there...

a gem i recently found is

He's Laughing at You- The Chaparral Bros. a very cool record, from 67 or 68, a very def. beatles influences... funny how things go full circle... this record was produced by Jimmy Bryant, who was a famous west coast country session guy and i am sure a young george harrison listened to him many times (certainly no doubt he listened to Buck Owens, as the Beatles covered Buck's songs...) ...but yeah, along w/ what Mike Nesmith was doing, this stuff was real cutting edge rock/country hybrid...

and of course there is some rockabilly that is basically "country rock":

Revenooer Man- George Jones


lastly, a fun song for our current times:

Where is America Going?- Wilma Lee and Stoney Cooper
 

michael

Bring out the vacuum
I reckon country rock is a decent enough description of what's going on formally with the first few Wilco albums, Jayhawks, Whiskeytown, Smog, etc.

Am sure I've written it elsewhere here, but I find it funny that Gram Parsons was heralded at the time (I understand) as a founder of "country rock", but now is heralded as proto-alt.country... guess it's like Neil Young being proto-grunge in the 90s - when you want to draw a line in the sand and point to a cool new thing that's happening you have to call whatever came before "proto" to maintain that imaginary line.

I like little bits of this kind of thing. I actually really like one of Iron & Wine's albums - Our Endless Numbered Days - which I can imagine is not a popular opinion to have here. Went and saw him play around the time of that album and loved it.

Also really like a compilation called Live & Direct, that might've only been available in Australia. Not all relevant, but has a couple of Bill Calahan songs, a couple of Kurt Wagner songs (Lambchop singer, not one of the X-Men) and a couple of Cat Power numbers. They're all good, and I enjoy all of them more in small, live-recorded bursts than trying to slog through an album.
 

michael

Bring out the vacuum

Haha,

wikipedia said:
As a voice actress, she portrays Azula on Avatar: The Last Airbender, several voice roles (though mainly Mandy) on The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy, Therese and Jeanette (Tourette) Voerman in the White Wolf RPG PC game Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines, Frida Suárez in El Tigre: The Adventures of Manny Rivera, Sam Manson in Danny Phantom, as well as Vicky in The Fairly OddParents. DeLisle has released four music CDs, which include goth-inspired folk and Americana tunes, and a few gospel-style songs.[1] And in Xiaolin Showdown she plays the voice of Kimiko Tohomiko.

... love the bitsy writing style you get on collaborative stuff like wikipedia - reads as if her Xiaolin Showdown voice role is somehow connected to her music!?

Anyway, weird enough bio that I'll investigate.


Is Will Oldham the one who's in Matewan? That's a little weird too.


Finally, glad Mike Nesmith got mentioned, because some of that country rock stuff he did is pretty great, or at least novel.
 
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Buick6

too punk to drunk
Is Will Oldham the one who's in Matewan? That's a little weird too.

Yep. He's also in OLD JOY and WENDY and LUCY or whatever it was called.

I guess you can't go past the seminal 'country rock' album, the Byrds SWEETHEART OF THE RODEO...but that Sony 2-disc set is a total killer, especially the more psychedelic stuff on CD 2. I never understood Neil Young's connection with 'grunge', since his sound was always more 'country' than fucking 'grunge'. To me grunge was like really shithouse BLACK SABBATH / BLACK FLAG, minus the inherent psychedelic sound of either.
 
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