This week’s smashers kick off with the second volume of live recordings from Jason Isbell and The 400 Unit’s annual residency at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, Tennessee. Live from the Ryman Vol. 2 features live versions of 13 songs from Weathervanes and Reunions, plus a stunning rendition of ‘The Last Song I Will Write’…
Jason Isbell and The 400 Unit follow up 2018’s Live from the Ryman with a second volume of live recordings from their annual residency at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, Tennessee. Live from the Ryman Vol. 2 features 15 live versions of songs from ‘Weathervanes’ and ‘Reunions’, including as stunning rendition of ‘The Last Song…
The first of this week’s sizzlers out the bag is Careful of Your Keepers: daring and soft, cutting and warm, this is a wild feat of complexity and combined dispositions. There’s a shared language of This Is The Kit’s family experience that is as audible as ever in these recordings, which boast beautiful instrumental performances…
Weathervanes, the new album from Jason Isbell And The 400 Unit, tackles issues such as gun violence, the opioid crisis and women’s rights all through Isbell’s signature songwriting lens. This is a collection of grown-up songs: songs about adult love, about change, about the danger of nostalgia and the interrogation of myths, about cruelty and…
Former Drive-By Trucker Jason Isbell and The 400 Unit come together again for a new album, Reunions, their follow-up to 2017’s Grammy-winning The Nashville Sound. Isbell explains the album’s title thus: “There are a lot of ghosts on this album. Sometimes the songs are about the ghosts of people who aren’t around anymore, but they’re…
We kick off this week’s six of the best with the aptly titled Natural Rebel from Richard Ashcroft – I mean, will you just look at him! This ‘natural rebel’ was of course best-known as frontman of The Verve until they multi-imploded. “My strongest set of songs to date,” says Ashcroft about his latest collection,…
Our batch of recommended releases for 16 June could well be our favourite of the year so far for its depth and quality. Crack-Up represents a real change for Fleet Foxes; instead of an expansive, sunny outlook we are ‘treated’ to a collection of inward-searching songs suffused with a bleak melancholy, resulting in a jarring,…
Pre-sale of the week is The Nashville Sound by Jason Isbell, out on 16 June. Jason Isbell, one of the great American singer-dongwriters, returns with The Nashville Sound. The album was recorded at Nashville’s legendary RCA Studio A and produced by Grammy Award-winner Dave Cobb, who produced Isbell’s previous album, Something More Than Free, and…
As there are so few new releases out on the 14th April, we thought we would highlight some of the great new releases that have just been announced during the last couple of weeks. These are: Paul Weller – A Kind Revolution, Kasabian – For Crying Out Loud, The Charlatans – Different Days, Gorillaz –…
Release of the week is Jason Isbell’s Something More Than Free, his follow-up to my favourite album of 2014, Southeastern. The week also brings a long overdue reissue of Michael Head’s The Magical World of The Strands, a stone classic, and new albums from The Chemical Brothers, Alan Jackson, Iron And Wine & Ben Bridwell,…