Last week I was busier than a one-legged man at an asskicking. Next week is quieter than a mime singalong. Go figure. And then read about the four albums on my list:
Robbie Fulks
Bluegrass Vacation
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Robbie Fulks’ adventurous spirit has defined a critically acclaimed 30-year career that has included 15 albums and two Grammy nominations. He came to national attention as a defining artist of the alt-country scene in the 1990s. While Fulks’s aversion to genre constraints and conventions has sometimes made him hard to pigeonhole, American country music, in the widest sense, is his home base — whether the country of Doc Watson, Bill Monroe, Merle Haggard, Bobby Charles or Mississippi John Hurt. For the last 10 years, he has focused on his writing and performing with homespun tales and acoustic instruments. But while bluegrass music has always been a part of Fulks’s musical vision, Bluegrass Vacation is his first purely bluegrass endeavor. Paired with a cast that features some of the brightest stars of the genre including Sam Bush, Sierra Hull, Ronnie McCoury, Tim O’Brien, Alison Brown, John Cowan and Jerry Douglas, the result is one of the most remarkable bluegrass albums of the century.”
Calvin Johnson
Gallows Wine
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Rock ’n’ roll is dead. Gallows Wine is a wake for its charred remains. Calvin Johnson traveled to Columbus, Mississippi to record Gallows Wine with the combo Hartle Road at their Pompeii studio. Columbus, in Lowndes County, is the childhood home of Tennessee Williams (just down US Route 45 from White Station, birthplace of Howlin’ Wolf). Gallows Wine gets primitive: Lurch pulls a night shift on organ, Grandma Moses handles the fife and drum. Calvin busks on melodica. Rockabilly spin cycle, guitar scrape and crush. Hand jive. You wanted Johnson howling beyond the magnolia curtain, you got it. Long live rock ’n’ roll.”
Mudhoney
Plastic Eternity
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “The world is filling up with trash. Humanity remains addicted to pollution despite the planet getting hotter by the minute. People are downing horse dewormer because some goober on television told them it cured COVID. Tom Herman of Pere Ubu still doesn’t have his own Wikipedia article. The apocalypse, it seems, is stupider than anyone could’ve predicted. Fortunately, the absurdities of modern life have always been prime subject matter for Seattle band Mudhoney. The foursome take aim at all of them with barbed humor and muck-encrusted riffs on Plastic Eternity, their 11th studio album. Mudhoney (vocalist Mark Arm, guitarist Steve Turner, bassist Guy Maddison and drummer Dan Peters) remain the ur underground group, their gnarly primordial punk stew and Arm’s sharply funny lyrics as potent a combination as they’ve been since the band’s formation in the late 1980s. From taking on climate change from the perspective of the climate — if the climate tried to play guitar like Jimi Hendrix — to a driving rock ’n’ roll song about taking drugs meant for livestock to a classic punk attack on treating humans like livestock, Plastic Eternity is a heady run through all the proto-genres of guitar rock with a keen eye on the inanities of the world in the 2020s.”
Nutana
Nutana
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, the saying goes. In the case of Sam Corbett, the cancer that didn’t kill him made him both stronger and vastly more creative as a songwriter, lyricist, and musician. And he has Nutana, his towering debut solo album, to prove it. Best known as drummer and co-founder of Juno-winning rock bruisers The Sheepdogs, Corbett conceived Nutana in 2018 while undergoing treatment for testicular cancer. At age 34. While his wife Ashley was pregnant for the first time. Talk about harrowing. Yet Nutana, named for the neighbourhood in Saskatoon where Corbett grew up, isn’t doom and gloom. Far from it. Rather, the album’s 10 dazzling original songs and two captivating covers — a faithful read of Buffy Sainte-Marie’s Cod’ine and a gender-bending take on Tame Impala’s ’Cause I’m A Man — hit all the retro, loose-limbed, and melodic notes one expects from a Sheepdog, albeit with lyrics that frequently deliver a wallop. “I think the music will appeal to Sheepdogs fans,” Corbett says. “It’s maybe a bit softer but still in the same territory of 70s-influenced rock with maybe some folk-rock.”
