County Tracks

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County Tracks - Page 19 of 23 - The best new music from Vermont and beyond.

Jimmy Cliff, Los Lobos, & Miranda Lambert Get Bluegrass-ed

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May 162017

The Bluegrass Gospel Project has been playing around Vermont for 16 years, over time becoming a lot more bluegrass than they are gospel. On their new and final album Delivered, they dig deep into their secular repertoire for some surprising covers.

Some of the songs’ origins won’t surprise anyone who listens to roots music: The Steeldrivers, Patty Griffin, Buddy and Julie Miller. But on others, they reach a little further outside the standard bluegrass repertoire.

Recorded live, Delivered dips deep into the well of country music – and not old-time country that would appease any bluegrass fan, but modern, Nashville-slick country from Miranda Lambert (“Somewhere Trouble Don’t Go”) and Alan Jackson (a gorgeous a cappella “Precious Memories”). They cover Los Lobos’ “Down On the Riverbed,” which in their hands sounds like a folk standard passed down for generations. Best of all is a revelatory bluegrass take on Jimmy Cliff’s iconic “Many Rivers to Cross,” which singer Colby Crehan imbues with a world of heartache. Continue reading »

Wren Kitz Finds Beauty in Sewage Treatment on New Song

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May 152017

NNA Tapes is probably Vermont’s best-known record label, an über-hip curator that has helped spearhead the recent cassette revival. Their catalog of experimentally-minded musicians extends from the out-there to the way-out-there. And their latest signing, fellow Vermonter Wren Kitz, can operate in both modes.

His first release with the label, Dancing on Soda Lake (out June 2), counts as relatively conventional – for him. Unlike some of his more experimental releases of ambient rumbles or Eraserhead nightmares, Dancing on Soda Lake is reasonably song-based. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t weird. Continue reading »

If Dylan Never Went Electric, More Albums Might Sound Like Eric George’s

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May 122017

The controversy over Bob Dylan going electric seems quaint now. History has more than vindicated him, to the point that even Pete Seeger began claiming he only tried to axe through the Newport mic cable due to poor audio quality. It’s a cliché that Dylan going electric changed everything, fusing poetry with rock and roll, you know the story. So does the Nobel committee.

Dylan electrifying folk music to some degree also signaled the end of the era of the truly acoustic singer-songwriter album. Sure, there are plenty of guitar-strummers in the folk and Americana worlds today, but these days even “stripped-down” albums are rarely that stripped down. A tasteful violin here, some brushed drums there. Fewer now follow the template of Bob’s early albums – truly solo acoustic, not acoustic-plus-some-other-stuff.

On his latest album Smoke The Fire Gives though, Burlington songwriter Eric George keeps the solo-acoustic tradition alive. He told the Burlington Free-Press he road-tested these songs while busking on the street (similar to Erin Cassels-Brown’s recent EP came about). Then, when a full-band recording space fell through, just recorded them thes ame way. Continue reading »

The Artist FKA Joey Pizza Slice Gets Serious

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May 092017

Joey Agresta has recorded under some odd names over the years: Joey Pizza Slice, Son of Salami, Salami Junior (they were all food-related). He gave his songs titles like “My Penis Is a Fortune Teller” and “I Never Wanna Take Acid Again.” But despite the jokey presentation, his weird and off-kilter pop experiments earned him fans in bands like Future Islands and Parquet Courts, with whom he released a split 7″.

Now he’s getting serious.

Sort of.

For the first time, the artist formerly known as Joey Pizza Slice has hung up his dough to record under his own name. Compared to much of his out-there past work, his debut album Let’s Not Talk About Music (out this Friday) is downright pretty, channeling shimmery bedroom pop like Ariel Pink or Washed Out. Unlike his seemingly tossed-off past exploits, he took three years to record this album, mostly on a pair of old cassette machines. As the press writeup says, “Contained here are songs of a hopeful sadness that mirror the darkness of these times and the decaying heart of the songsmith. This is Agresta’s most personal and sincere work thus far” (not exactly a high bar). Continue reading »

The Best Vermont Artists at Waking Windows (And In General)

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May 032017

We normally don’t do concert previews here. My goal with this young blog is to spread the gospel of Vermont music to an audience beyond the state’s sometimes-confining borders. And writing about regionally-specific events generally goes against that mandate.

This weekend’s Waking Windows festival is an exception.

Waking Windows is the Vermont music scene in microcosm. In some respects the Burlington equivalent of SXSW, Waking Windows surrounds a few bigger names (Real Estate and Dan Deacon this year) with dozens of the state’s best local bands. Naming the best Vermont artists playing the festival almost doubles as naming the best Vermont artists period. And that is exactly our mandate. Continue reading »

Japanese Synth-Pop and The Little Mermaid Inspire Haunting Electronic Album

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May 012017

Back in 2011, the soundtrack to the Ryan Gosling movie Drive updated 1980s synth-pop for the 21st century and became a big hit doing so. Songs like “Nightcall” and “A Real Hero” brought a film-noir darkness to the genre’s supremely catchy melodies and on his new album Pax Romana, Vermont-based producer Ebn Ezra aka Ethan Wells does the same.

Though Wells calls the Drive soundtrack “iconic,” he draws from further back in the history of synthesized music. He cites as his album’s biggest influence a Japanese artist named Chinatsu Kuzuu, who recorded medieval folk songs backed by MIDI compositions (similar in a way to a recent album of electronic Gregorian chants). But Kuzuu recorded back in the early 1990s, when MIDI – a primitive form of electronic music – was a new frontier. “It sounds like the most bizarre thing,” Wells says, “English folk by way of a Japanese woman in the ’90s using no more than a computer. So I thought, if she can do it, so can I.” Continue reading »

A Song Celebrating Vinyl That Marc Maron Would Appreciate

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Apr 172017

Anyone who listens to Marc Maron’s WTF podcast knows he is a vinyl obsessive. And anyone who follows him closely on Twitter will knew he is also a fan of Vermont quartet Swale (he’s shouted out both of their first two albums). So Swale’s newest track “Release Your Records” – sort of a theme song for the vinyl revival – will be right up his alley.

It will also be up the alley of any other vinyl aficionado, or really just anyone who cares passionately about music. However, Spotify users might not spot all the plays on words singer Eric Olsen packs into the lyrics. Here’s three puns in as many lines: “Spin the story of your life / Roll your sleeves and show your stripes / Deep cuts aren’t made with knives.” Continue reading »

New Wave Geniuses Madaila Go Full Macklemore With Thrift Shop Music Video

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Apr 112017

We named Madaila’s “Secret” the Second Best Song of 2016. “Realization,” off the same album Traces, is almost as good. Though Traces can get spacey and psyched-out at times, both tracks showcase the new-wave pop songwriting chops of frontman Mark Daly, a man who knows his way around a catchy hook.

The band just released a new music video for the track, taking over Burlington, Vermont costume shop Old Gold for a fashion show. It’s the biggest thing that’s happened to musical thrift shops since Macklemore. And if the video’s intro music sounds appealing, it appears to be a MIDI version of one of Madaila’s other great songs, “Give Me All Your Love”. Continue reading »

Saints and Liars Play Bluegrass for Metalheads

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Apr 042017

When Vermont quartet Saints and Liars lists their influences, a lot of them are typical for an Americana group: The Band, Waylon Jennings, and “all 3 Hank Williams.” A few, though, come a little further from left field: Motörhead. Metallica.

Though the music they make is certainly not metal – they don’t even play many instruments made of metal – you can hear the genre’s influences: high-voltage speed, raw power, and gruff hollering. Singer Jed Hughes sounds like James Hetfield at a campfire and, on songs like “Oil Slick,” the band speeds along as fast as they can smack a washboard. Just as Rodrigo y Gabriela bring their metal fandom into flamenco music, Saints and Liars headbang through bluegrass-y Americana. Call it “thrash folk.”

Saints and Liars’ self-titled debut album came out last year, but the band has just updated it with an expanded edition featuring two new tracks: “Sit and Sing” and “Drunk and Alone.” The new songs fit in seamlessly with the rest, but recording them proved a little more challenging. Continue reading »

Soundcloud Breakout David Chief Makes Cassettes Cool Again on New Beat Tape

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Mar 312017

In the so-called streaming wars between Spotify, Apple Music,and the rest, Soundcloud often gets forgotten. Perhaps part of the reason is that it traditionally has not offered ads or any real way for an artist to monetize their work (though that’s changing), so bigger stars avoided the platform. As a result, it’s developed an ecosystem filled with up-and-coming experimentalists, particularly in hip-hop and electronic music.

One of the more recent Soundcloud breakouts is David Chief. A 22-year old producer in Burlington, he’s only been recording music for a few years, but a recent track called “roots” has racked up almost 40,000 streams on Soundcloud, and others aren’t far behind.

“I’ve been teaching myself producing/beatmaking for 4 years now, ever since moving to Vermont in 2013 for college,” he says. “I started as just a fan who liked Soundcloud for the underground & independent artists, and eventually fell in love with the chill, boom-bap stuff and decided to try it myself. I really liked how the beatmaking scene was like a little community. When I first started out, nobody wanted to collaborate or drop a follow, but as a really active user of Soundcloud, people began to take notice of my page.” Continue reading »