#3832 Richard Swift - Dressed Up for the Letdown

3.5/5 soaked in music of a bygone era, jaunty and morose notes from across an ocean of time, spiked with these rare moments of pure joy, but often repeating himself just a bit too much. What must that be like?

And I fear friend, this could be the last song
But we're all good to go

#3652 Kevin Morby - Oh My God

4/5 searing, earnest folk//rock, pointed upward through gospel. Oh My God sounds eternal, inevitable, like George Harrison, Songs Ohia. Difficult, in its way - that patience and directness, a slow motion shot in the head

#3563 Norma Tenega - Walkin' My Cat Named Dog

3/5 Tenega's got great ragged edges and galloping energy, the rock songs are thrilling, sounding full and close. The folk songs are folk songs.

#3493 Andy McKee - Art of Motion

3/5 dexterity incarnate, with all the feel and flow you can pull from one instrument with two hands, words where there are none. And god, whatever happens on that closer; devastating, unforgettable.

Though. Look. I get that this is the Andy show, and it's all about what he can do with just his guitar, and a certain crowd will appreciate the purity. But imagine what this could do if it would deign to spread from solo showiness, with a little bit of backing, say, with some William Tyler synths. This is a showcase, and sure, duly impressed, but solo jerkoffery can only go so far when it comes to actually reaching people (again, that last track aside, due respect

#3469 Haruomi Hosono - Hosono House

4/5 weightless japanese Americana, with the creak of a chair just out of sight, wrapped in the pull of nylon. sweet and clear, with a spike of dr john swagger. doubly recommended for anyone looking for something unexpected

#3459 Bruce Springsteen - Western Stars

3/5 there's no illusion that the protagonists of any of these ballads is Bruce himself, or that the America he's describing exists anymore. The theme is restlessness, so tuck these stories away from here. Ballads that work best when they touch on the universal (Hitch Hikin', title track). His voice is still there, well suited to these low-key ramblers, stuck in place

#3455 Rodriguez - Cold Fact

2/5 folk music, how does it sound so halfassed and so overwrought at the same time? it's like backpack rap without the beats or the conviction. the scant scraps of guitar fuzz are the only consolation. Actual song title:

This is Not a Song, It's an Outburst: Or, the Establishment Blues

can't make this shit up

#3425 Matt Berry - Opium

3/5 where Berry is still mired in his ironic mode, glammy and vamping before collapsing into quasi-intentional bathos. catchy in snatches but samey and slight

#3420 Matt Berry - Witchazel

4/5 quietly offkilter, just this side of parody, rolling around in folk and prog and all of their uncanny excursions into melody. Arch at times, but throwing all off like a cloak

#3407 Nicky Hopkins - The Tin Man Was A Dreamer

4/5 rightsolid romp, with Kinksian glimpses of sentimental beauty and all the rollick you'd expect from Hopkins' 70s-Stones pedigree. The kind of unpretentious, loose fun that you don't often get from piano rockers

#3406 Karen Dalton - In My Own Time

3.5/5 Dalton's voice is a difficult, special thing, cracked and ragged beyond reason and strangely enticing. Combine her effortless knack for phrasing and some lush country-tinged production for an album you'll remember like an uncanny dream

#3405 Bill Fay - Time of the Last Persecution

4/5 Mournful and beautiful and resigned, with enough honkytonk shuffle to keep things from getting dreary. Rich backing matches Fay's confident delivery perfectly. Soulful stuff

#3397 Toshiyuki Terui - What I Think About the World

2.5/5 Wandering guitar lines that sound like instrumental versions of existing songs, or otherwise like something's missing. Could be handy if you're making a movie that needs background music for 11 different sunrise scenes

#3321 William Tyler - Goes West

3.5/5
Pleasant enough virtuosity, but missing that epic patience and ambient buzzes that made Modern Country sound so gloriously infinite. These songs are penned and domesticated and lesser for it

#3267 Bruce Springsteen - Nebraska

Not a lyrics guy, but alright. More than the sum of their parts, these 10 songs gather us up, we coast dwellers, and tell what desperation looks like. Occasionally cartoonish, but mostly these tales of nothing-left-to-lose land, the spare production stretching out like the sky, stunning in flat endlessness 4/5

#3265 Sam Gendel - 4444

Jazzy, nuanced guitar brushes and bristles, minimal and close. It'd read like arty post-rock if not for its staggering awkwardness. The cringey vocals are hushed and overdone. Mentioning oxford commas during an acoustic rap is unrecoverable 2.5/5

#3029 Mike Oldfied - Hergest Ridge

If there was any debate about whether Tubular Bells was overrated this settles it - a vastly better album, with more highlights, better flow, and none of the clunky distractions. Tubular Bells is also fine and good - just not a masterpiece so much as arriving at a time and place hungry for a savior. Where Bells chopped sloppily between ideas, Ridge breathes, develops, blossoms, with the hypnosis of ambient achieved through melodies so clean you barely notice their passing.

And its still an indulgent wank. And it's crazy that this topped any country's charts (good trivia there). But better than most if it's what you're in the market for, overflowing with a sense of wonder for the world, riding contours, gasping open into space, a sunrise where you try to suck in the moment and hold it hardened in yourself for later, ideally forever 4.5/5

#3020 Greensky Bluegrass - Shouted, Written Down and Quoted

In an era of Wagon Wheel and Mumford its easy to be cynical about deep-feeling bluegrass pluck-and-shuffle. These boys get there though, on through to this hard old heart as old as they singing about being, some Josh Ritter bus to the land of feelings 3.5/5

#2577 Syd Barrett - The Madcap Laughs

A sloppy stumble of rambling lyrics and loosely-connected strums, piano clatters, and other backings. Barret strains to reach some lines, while others reverberate too-close. It's all an underwhelming mess that's impossible to ignore, sneaking in backdoors, Terrapin's haunting backbone reflected again and again 3.5/5

#2567 Leon Redbone - On the Track

40 years ago this was a revival. Weird.

A shuffling, dusty piece of moaning, bare-bones ragtime, scant few drums to speak of, just the thump of a horn, a tap of a foot, a fingernail on acoustic body to keep time. The devil's in the details, in Redbone's big, wobbling warble, in the super-close, super-crisp production, you are right up in the room, which feels of porches, floorboards, sunsets through one tree, while strings and harmonicas and other ghosts coast by.

Surely made in a studio proper, and distant from real troubles, but Redbone sells it 4/5