Drag City

A 20th anniversary reissue of SILVER JEWS' Amerian Water. Even as an unapologetic anti-metallite, I still can’t escape the call of this band’s silvery gleam. Still pleasant, still clever, still all the good-great pop action DAVID BERMAN and STEPHEN MALKMU

Matt Sweeney and Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy return with the follow-up to their Superwolf album from years back. The songs, then, go boldly into undreamed-of places, and go deep, as Matt and Bonny take all the musics they know to make songs that penetrate. In c

Mind Maintenance is the duo of Joshua Abrams playing guimbri and Chad Taylor on mbira. This is where the music begins, but Mind Maintenance can’t be described with a summing of parts and players. It’s not about world music, it’s not about jazz. It’s about

Out on the street, indie rock was an exciting way of life for boys and girls alike in the gay 90s. Here's a couple of voices from the fertile Denver scene, Lisa and Hilarie of Secret Square, picking a favorite from the Drag City young galaxy of stars. In

An electrical tension enters the room—a guitar, left to its own devices, is surfing the breeze. Breaking in the air, smiling from ear to ear. Bicoastal, even! Suddenly, The Peacers are back with their third album. The time has been kind. Three years since

2005's Superwolf is an acclaimed collaborative album from songcrafters Matt Sweeney and Bonnie Prince Billy aka Will Oldham. Bonnie challenged Matt to write music to a series of song lyrics, and this collaboration was done over some months, and included l

The Silver Jews' music has a sense of human care that is at odds with the 'easy art' overload that constantly bombards us. A mixture of great truths and false trails, their records make you smile and want to get drunk and play them all back to back; chron

Broken nation time! Dark skies over our days, an increased reliance on black-market products. Wanna buy some 5-year old sunshine? With 2020 hindsight, it’s looking pretty good... Smash-cut to 2015. Two boys with guitars on their chests, stretching songwri

Received an 8.0 rating from Pitchfork. Bajas Fresh is on the beach here in 2017, existing and thriving in the same wrecked world as you and me. How they finding it so chill and pretty? It’s been over three years since the last proper BITCHIN BAJASs—a natu

2020! Now it can be told: the charade of a world without new MAGIK MARKERS records (six-plus years!) has finally ended. In these times of contagion fables and hacky blockbuster N95 disaster imagery IRL, Markers emerge again like three Lazarus from their t

For his first record in….uh, well, just a little over a year (!), BILL CALLAHAN’s given us his first Gold Record. You could probably call the album “Gold Records” too: all the songs have a stand-alone feel, like singles, meant for you to have a deep encou

Five years after Tangier Sessions, SIR RICHARD BISHOP, we presume, is back from his travels around the world. With Oneiric Formulary, he’s dug deeper into his bag of extra-musical gestures from the eternal and unknowable, along with a few sounds we might

Life is a Rorschach, life is a Rashomon. Fuck your facts. Throw ‘em out with yesterday’s webpages. Lives lie beyond the equations of currency, border lines and government—and truth is just a drop in the beholder’s eye. TY SEGALL has made whole records tha

The second collection of singles from the one-and-only TY SEGALL. Features non-album singles and B-sides from the Goodbye Bread, Twins and Sleeper era (2011-2013), including covers of GG Allin, Velvet Underground and The Groundhogs. Includes the songs: “S

Named # 1 Album of the Year by MOJO. Pitchfork Best New Music. 8.5!! The fourth studio album from BILL CALLAHAN. In the song-world of Bill Callahan, the present realities tumble ecstatically like cloth in the wind—sheets and flags and clothes. These thin

Essentially an ensemble recorded live in the studio, Bill Callahan’s Apocalypse is the corpus delecti. If tape is like meat, this record is the whole hog, no cuts, delectables and guts intact! In the opening salvo “Drover,” the cattle are herded. Callahan

As you listen to Shepherd In a Sheepskin Vest, a feeling of totality, of completeness, steals over you, like a thief in broad daylight. Of course it does – you're listening to a new Bill Callahan record! The first one in almost six years! What more do you

Located at the mid point between Lee Marvin and Harvey Oswald, Bill Callahan aka Smog has established a reputation as a classic American male outsider. With 12 studio albums under his Smog belt Callahan remains an enigma. A consummate storyteller in the t

Purple Mountains is the new nom-de-rock of David Berman (Silver Jews) and also the name of what will be known as one of his greatest albums – full of double-jointed wit and wisdom, up to the neck in his special recipe of handcrafted country-rock joys and

Espers' self-titled first release appeared in 2004, heralding an era in which there was a perception of back-to-the-roots in the underground; kids making new music that spoke strongly of folk traditions and psychedelia, in the process setting themselves a

"Our salivating makes it all taste worse," croons Ty Segall in "Taste," the lead single from his latest album, First Taste. He's talking about us: how we're the masters of our own destiny, tellers of our own prophecy, makers of our own sickened choices. I