Fantastic Cat’s Cat Out of Hell arrives with the band’s usual grin intact, but beneath the loose charm is a sturdier kind of record: one built on shared voices, accumulated mileage, and the small existential leaks that start showing up in adult life. That makes it a good candidate for a look backward, not to some obvious alt-country touchstone, but to The Band’s Stage Fright, another ensemble album where group chemistry sweetens songs about unease, pressure, and trying to keep your balance while the room keeps moving.
Readers’ Pick: Fantastic Cat – Cat Out of Hell
You picked Fantastic Cat – Cat Out of Hell as your favorite new release for the week of April 10, 2026.
Hank Alrich – Broken River
It’s well known that the Armadillo World Headquarters was at ground-zero for the Austin music scene in the early 70’s. Gary P. Nunn once noted, “It’s been said that our music was the catalyst that brought the shit-kickers and the hippies together at the Armadillo.” Presumably one of those hippies was Hank Alrich, a California […]
Adam Gaffney Song Premiere – Product of Another Sad Song
You’ve no doubt heard the phrase, “but for the grace of God, there go I.” For St. Louis native Adam Gaffney, sometimes God’s grace wasn’t around and so he went down a few harmful paths. He has a new album coming out next month, Product of Another Sad Song, and it’s centered around some of […]
Corey Harris, Alvin Youngblood Hart & Guy Davis – Fight On! True Blues Vol.2
A niece once pronounced to me that all the great blues musicians are dead. Alvin Youngblood Hart, Guy Davis and Corey Harris show that’s not true, as they are among the best blues masters of my own generation. With Fight On! True Blues Vol. 2, these masters have created an acoustic blues timepiece that is […]
Tim Nielsen of Drivin N Cryin on Pop-up Gigs and Merch Sales
Tim Nielsen of southern rock stalwarts Drivin N Cryin talks about how he keeps busy, what sustains the band financially, and what the band’s drummer eats most nights while on tour.
Ben Musser Song Premiere – Sentimental Fever
Like all things artistic, it’s hard to predict where one’s musical muse is going to be. A lot of musicians find a move into some beautiful surroundings provides the necessary inspiration–there’s nothing like Mother Nature to open your mind to the wonders of life. Wyoming resident Ben Musser found the opposite. After spending years in […]
Monday Morning Video – Dallas House Show Preview
There’s something about a Sunday afternoon in a Dallas backyard — relaxed, sunny, the kind of day that makes you remember why you love live music in the first place. We’ve been lucky enough to host some incredible artists at the Sunday Social over the years, and if we’re being honest, we’ve gotten a little […]
Now & Then: Charley Crockett’s Age of the Ram and the reach of Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs
Charley Crockett’s Age of the Ram arrives as the third and final entry in his Sagebrush Trilogy, a 20-song, 45-minute set built around the outlaw figure Billy McLane and cut again with Shooter Jennings in Los Angeles. The obvious move would be to compare it to some other modern revivalist country record, but Crockett is aiming farther back than that. This album is trying to turn country songs into a movie, or maybe into the memory of one, and that points straight to Marty Robbins’ Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs, the 1959 western cornerstone that helped teach later songwriters how to make myth feel personal.
Andy Hedges – The Westerner
It used to be called country & western. Then two or three decades ago, for reasons I’m sure the ethnographers still debate, it just became country music. Western just sort of slipped out of the vernacular, except for maybe a strip of North America from around Calgary to somewhere near El Paso. Fortunately, there’s still […]