Photo by Lindsey Verrill, from Melissa Engelman’s MySpace page by Nick DeRiso Austin-based singer-songwriter Melissa Engleman explores life with a tough vulnerability on the urban folk set At the Hotel Café, often displaying a fortitude so quiet as to deceive. She gets knocked to the ground, while brilliantly fusing alt-country,Read More

Photo from Todd Christoffel’s ReverbNation.com page by Nick DeRiso Seattle-based folk-rockers Don’t Ask have a fondness for the comfy sounds of 1970s pop, though they are careful not to get too caught up in nostalgia. They simply use that era’s singer-songwriter-inspired prose, its soaring symphonic pop structure and its feel-goodRead More

by Nick DeRiso New York City-based Brian Hugh O’Neill can’t get away from hard truths on Free World. “The light’s not very kind in this place,” O’Neill sings in the anthematic “Careful What You Want.” “There’s a shadow moving over your face.” That shadow is moving, really, over the wholeRead More

by Mark Saleski I heard a short piece on the radio yesterday about the band Cake. Apparently, their new album has hit the top of the charts. The bad news is that hitting the top of the charts doesn’t mean what it used to mean. Showroom of Compassion took theRead More

Photo by Vicki Blankenship by Mark Saleski The phenomenon of crowdfunding is not entirely new, but it appears to be gaining momentum. I first became aware of it a few years ago when jazz artists such as Cuong Vu, Jim Hall, and Maria Schneider created projects through artistShare. The conceptRead More

Nobody plays it like Buddy, as his Living Proof testifies. by Pico This part of the Year End series is typically the shortest, and not because there’s less excellent blues and roots records than other kinds of music, but because I regrettably have little time leftover to delve into theseRead More

by Mark Saleski There are so many things we depend upon in the Monadnock region of New Hampshire that it’s sometimes easy to forget that not all of them have been around forever…or will continue to be so. Just as the mountain itself solidly anchors our mental picture of theRead More

by Nick DeRiso An album about dreams reclaimed, Murray Flint’s The Journey traces his own road back from painfully debilitating tendonitis. After nearly a decade away from the guitar, the Olympia, Wash., resident discovered a finger-style approach long associated with Merle Travis. This technique simultaneously sounds more complex, since theRead More

Music obsessives and “regular” folks alike know of the song/memory retrieval phenomenon — you hear a song and instantly remember where you were the first time you heard it. The speed and clarity of detail associated with the song can be quite amazing. There have been claims that odors produceRead More

by S. Victor Aaron Here’s a trio of African-Americans playing bluegrass, vintage country, jug and other hillbilly styled music, played the old-fashioned way. But just listen to the music and you’ll realize the appeal isn’t at all in the novelty of this setup. No, it’s because they play it soRead More