Twangville

A music blog featuring Alt-Country, Americana, Indie, Rock, Folk & Blues. Est. 2005.

Now & Then: Whitehorse’s All I Want Is All of It and the reach of Barton Hollow

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Whitehorse have always made tension sound like a room two people refuse to leave. On All I Want Is All of It, Luke Doucet and Melissa McClelland return to early folk-rock romanticism with the mileage of a long musical and marital partnership, recorded with a ragged, farmhouse-studio looseness that lets the floorboards speak up too. The “Then” that helps frame it is The Civil Wars’ Barton Hollow, a 2011 touchstone for modern male-female roots duos built on intimacy, friction, and the dangerous sport of singing very close together. 

Steep Canyon Rangers – Next Act

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You’ve no doubt heard the saying, popularized by author Thomas Wolfe, “you can’t go home again.” There are an endless number of dissections about what that really means, but the gist is that nostalgia has colored memories enough that the home you remember wasn’t exactly like that. So it was with some curiosity I listened […]

Marley’s Ghost – Honky Tonk

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If you follow the Americana music genre, in all its facets, it’s not long before you become a fan of one or more regional bands. It’s not that they don’t have fans around the country or internationally, but rather they’ve found a community, their community, that supports them financially and emotionally. Even without new music […]

Twangville Celebrates the Bottle Rockets in NYC

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Welfare Music: A Tribute to the Bottle RocketsThursday, June 11Lucinda’s, East Village, NYCShowtime: 7 PM GET TICKETS Before Americana became a catch-all term, The Bottle Rockets helped give it shape: loud guitars, sharp stories, Midwestern grit, and songs about everyday lives that somehow felt bigger than everyday life. Formed in Missouri in the early 1990s, […]

Monday Morning Video – Joe Strummer

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Joe Strummer never stopped being Joe Strummer. Long after the Clash, long after the revolution was supposed to have been televised and filed away, he kept showing up — in dive bars, on festival stages, at record stores in lower Manhattan — still swinging. This 2001 clip finds him in a New York record store […]

Now & Then: Hiss Golden Messenger’s I’m People and the reach of Veedon Fleece

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A good Hiss Golden Messenger record does not arrive like a statement from a mountaintop. It pulls up beside you at a gas station, coffee gone cold, with a half-finished thought about mercy, children, money, God, and whether the map is helping. I’m People fits that line perfectly: a road record with home on its mind, full of M.C. Taylor’s worn-in gospel of doubt and persistence. For a “Then,” Van Morrison’s Veedon Fleece makes the sharper companion, not because Taylor sounds like Morrison, but because both albums use travel as a way to measure the soul’s weather.