George Ducas Yellow Rose Motel Loud Ranch
Back in 1994 George Ducas released his self-titled debut album on Liberty Records. It was a mix of traditional and contemporary country, and it was produced by one of the more interesting producers of that time, Richard Bennett (who helped Steve Earle’s Guitar Town album). It sold well but not in massive numbers. The single Lipstick Promises is probably his best know song from the album. Two years later a second album came out on Capitol titled WHERE I STAND, which was again produced by Bennett with the same mix of influences. It was a sound that I liked and that was current at the time, having just the right amount of edginess to make it interesting without losing sight of its country base.
Some seventeen years later, album number three was released. 4340 more or less carried on from where he left off but with some adjustments to the overall sound to suit a natural progression, and also to perhaps gain some play on radio. It was produced by Ducas and Matt McClure, with elected players on board to get the best sound possible. Now he has released a fourth album and is again co-producing with McClure, and again using a team of top-notch players like Mike Johnson on steel and an array of guitarists including Kenny Greenberg, Jeff King and the recently deceased top-notch session player J.T. Corenflos. As is the norm for Ducas, the writing credits are shared with the likes of Jacob Lyda, Jeremy Crady, Trent Sumner, Neal Coty and others. The songs explore the perennial themes of love - lost, found or misplaced.
The album opens with the 12-string guitar sound underpinning Don’t Leave Her Lonely. It pretty immediately brings you to a sound that has been his stock-in-trade throughout all his musical releases. It is robust but melodic and is enhanced by Ducas’ expressive voice. It is however not exactly a sound that hard core honky-tonkers may totally embrace and has some resonance with some of those with a broader perspective. Not that it ever could be classed as pop-country or infused with rap. In fact, the second track Country Badass takes a pot at those who assume the country mantle without ever really being convinced.
From there on the tracks can feature brass or some high octane guitars and drums. In Eastwood the actor and director are used as a metaphor for seeking what you want in life. There are other times he reflects on life from a more small town, back room perspective as with the ballad Old Timers wherein he sees that life experiences and attitudes make the old timers tougher and worthy of listening to for the wisdom they can impart. Unlove You has a nice guitar riff to underscore the regret at the ending of a relationship. Reflections on lifestyle are covered in I Got This and Cold Bud. Preachers and Pushers has a solid beat pushing the song’s message about those who “sell the one way to heaven and one way to hell”, but it’s a long road that he affirms he will be committed to with his partner.
The final song, the title track, is a slow blues that clocks in at over 6 minutes and closes the album in a different mood to the previous songs. It places the protagonists in a room in the Yellow Rose Motel, Room 29 to be precise. In that room there is some loving, but that turns to anger and ultimately murder, and incarceration in a very different room. All of this places Ducas not as an artist whose time may have been back in the 90s but rather one whose future could well be ahead of him. One hopes that the cards will fall right.
Review by Stephen Rapid
Sean Harrison Halfway From Nashville Cosmic Cowboy
This is the debut release from a very agreeable singer/songwriter who falls into a tradition of autobiographical writers who deliver their musings with a sense of humour and insight. Harrison previously played in bands in Texas but somewhere he took the wrong path of drugs and alcohol. He was born in Nashville but grew up in the Arkansas town of Fayetteville, a college town with a solid musical heritage. For a time he lived and busked in Europe before returning to the place he grew up in. He has been writing throughout that time and he was also the producer and writer for fellow artist Milton Patton, whose album charted on release in 2016. This debut deserves similar success.
There are 12 songs on the album and, after numerous plays, I have pretty much enjoyed them all. There are well written and played, with the melodies and words staying in the mind. The album was produced by Benjamin Meade and co-produced by fellow players Michael Brinson, Paul Carabello (guitars, drums and bass) and Harrison himself (electric and acoustic guitars). The album includes contributions too from other musicians on pedal steel, keyboards, accordion and mandolin, all of which gives the album a body and depth to its country-flavoured Americana.
However, it is the voice and writing of Harrison which is the centrepiece of this album. The songs have much going for them beyond that such as the accordion in Fingertips, the pedal steel in the title song and so on. In the song Halfway From Nashville Harrison mentions many influential songwriters whose words have served as a personal roadmap and talisman. The titles may give a hint as to the diversity of topics and reach: Go To Girl (a real foot tapper), Ode To A Goner, Wake Up Dead, Psychedelic, and The Last Water Tower - the tale of a man whose aim in life is to climb every last water tower in his county, bar one which he is working out how to bypass the security, “as water towers are built to climb.” This may give you some idea of the diversity of Harrison’s themes. Breathe Out Her Name, the final song, has a lighter touch on a poetic ballad of love and need.
He may have taken a long path to get to this place but that journey has furnished him with a some insight into the peculiar ways of the world. Maybe his choice of a Sidney Nolan painting of Ned Kelly on the cover mirrors his sense of (mis)adventure and seeking some freewheeling ethos to live by. But whatever the reason Sean Harrison is worth listening to for a whole set of reasons, all of them pretty damn good.
Review by Stephen Rapid
The Pawn Shop Saints Ordinary Folks Dolly Rocker
In the reverse of the usual way these things go, singer/songwriter/producer/player Jeb Barry has removed his name as a prefix to the band name. So this new album offers 9 songs of downbeat deliverances on the ordinary people he has encountered while carrying out his living as a working musician. He made a conscious decision during this time to detour and to visit small towns and the people and places that lived there.
They open with a story of a particular state of mind that comes from living in Cumberland, highlighting the nature of the depression that exists now in that area. You Don’t Know The Cumberland, as with many here, has something of a melancholy disposition at heart. That may be because of Barry’s laid back but highly impressionistic vocal. It feels right for the songs and their subjects, as if he is letting these people have their place in the songs as against a showboating presentation. The band of Barry on guitar, bass and banjo is joined by Michael O’Neill on guitar and vocals, Josh Pisano playing drums and bassist Chris Samson. The offer a detailed and light-touch approach to the backings that allow each song its own breath.
Old Men, New Trucks kind of speaks for itself in its consideration of the two. Body In The River has an upbeat riff and tempo that contrast with the subject matter. Southern Mansions looks at the buildings that sit on hills off the interstate that probably belong to a different era - there is talk of better days but acknowledgment that the people who live there are open and friendly enough to tell a story when approached and yet recognise that things “could always be worse.” Also graced by a structure that is memorable, Ain’t No Mama Here again is not the cheeriest of subject matters but still manages to feel hopeful in spite of that. Pack A Day deals with that habit leading to a slow self-destruction but that inevitability being in some ways a means of a temporary relief. Dry River Song is again about locality, but with the hope of romance entwined.
Lynyrd Skynyrd is tribute to the band that was a growing-up favourite, that offered respite from the bullying that was suffered for being an awkward skinny kid. It is again set to a low key distinctly non-Southern Rock beat and backing. It works all the more poignantly for that.
There is one song here not written by Barry alone and that is New Year’s Eve, Somewhere In The Midwest which he co-wrote with Jason Isbell, and which fits in with the overall nature of the “ordinary folk” who inhabit this album.
Jeb Barry produced, recorded and mixed this album which was delayed by the pandemic during recording, as well as by an eye injury he suffered during its recording. It is noted that Covid restricted the process and meant that some proposed guests were unable to participate. However there is an end product that is in itself both rewarding and restorative because of or despite of that.
Review by Stephen Rapid
Borders No One Else Self Release
Borders came about when Norfolk guitarist and songwriter Callum Granger met Gibraltarian Faith S White when they both enrolled in a Contemporary Music Degree course in Guildford in 2017. The acoustic duo have been performing in venues and at festivals throughout the south of England ever since. This is their debut album (apart from an earlier foray in recording an EP) and is self recorded and self produced. Their own description of their sound sums it up well - roots/americana/blues/contemporary folk.
Callum is the main songwriter, with seven songs here, while Faith contributes two. As far as I can ascertain, Callum plays guitars (acoustic and steel bodied) and Faith is the lead vocalist, with harmony vocals from Callum.
The album opens with an attacking acoustic guitar rhythm as backdrop to Faith’s storming So Unreal. Possessed of a naturally powerful voice which she knows how to use, I preferred to hear it in the quieter numbers, such as in Stranger Lost In Time. When Lovers Say Goodbye is positively punk, with shared harmony vocals throughout. Opening with some nice acoustic picking from Callum, All That I’ll Be Needing is the strongest original song in the collection - a blues-tinged breakup song that allows Faith to show off her vocal range.
There are also three cover songs - Neil Young’s protest song Ohio gets a powerful treatment with the addition of percussion; there’s a decent version of Taylor Swift’s Safe and Sound; and the title track which is actually Ida Mae’s If You Don’t Love Me but has been changed to No One Else by Borders.
This is a duo to watch.
Review by Eilís Boland
Sam Morrow Getting’ By on Getting’ Down Forty Below
Houston, Texas born Sam Morrow has seen a lot of water pass under the bridge over the past decade. A serious drug habit resulted him in leaving Texas for rehab in California when barely out of his teens. That was back in 2011 and having kicked his habit he relaunched his musical career with a debut album EPHEMERAL in 2014. THERE IS NO MAP (2015) and CONCRETE AND MUD (2018) followed, the latter earning him inclusion in Rolling Stone’s ‘10 New Country Artists You Need To Know’ and entering the Americana Top 10 album charts.
Although you’re likely to find Morrow’s albums filed under Country or Americana, that does not paint an accurate picture of where he’s coming from. His sound is a fusion of southern rock, blues and funk with a side of outlaw country.
GETTING’ BY ON GETTIN’ DOWN sticks with the winning formula of its predecessor, circling back to a sound that was more celebrated in the early 70’s. Think along the lines of Little Feat, Tony Joe White and Lynyrd Skynyrd and you’re in the right ball park. The playing throughout is stellar and honed from the road miles that Morrow and his players have travelled in recent years, both in America and Europe. Primarily guitar driven with a wicked rhythm section and hooks that that come hard and fast, it’s Morrow's most impressive album. Recorded in L.A. at a studio owned by The Doors’ guitar player Robby Krieger, Morrow and his sidekick and drummer Eric Corne were joined for the recordings by legendary guitar player Doug Pettibone and bassist Taras Prodaniuk, both long time members of Lucinda Williams’ band. With quality such as that in the studio, not surprisingly the playing is exceptional.
Morrow is equally at home with full on bluesy belters Wicked Woman and Golden Venus as he is with no nonsense rockers Rosarita, Money Ain’t a Thing and the title track. He also finds room for a couple of chilled ballads with I’ll Think I’ll Just Die Here and Sit Crooked, Talk Straight.
GETTING’ BY ON GETTIN’ DOWN finds Morrow firing on all cylinders and recreating the energy of his live sets. It’s one from the slow cooker that takes its time to connect but is well worth the time invested.
Review by Declan Culliton
Michael J. Sheehy Distance Is The Soul Of Beauty Lightning Archive
The 'new normal', as our current state of survival is annoyingly referred to, has had an understandably profound impact on artists and musicians. Some have found themselves starved of the motivation to write, despite having infinitely more time on their hands with gigs and tours shelved. Others have found the stimulus to write but not necessarily in the direction they would have travelled pre-pandemic.
Michael J. Sheehy is the former lead man of London rock band Dream City Film Club. He has recorded a number of solo albums and is currently a member of two bands, Miraculous Mule and United Sounds of Joy. He had been plotting a return to solo recording for some time, following his break from releasing solo material over a decade ago. The bones of an album had been fleshed out over a couple of years, but remained in an unfinished state while he strived for perfection, often reworking songs he had considered complete and other times dumping songs and writing their replacements.
The arrival of COVID - 19 changed his direction entirely and set him off on a somewhat different musical path. DISTANCE IS THE SOUL OF BEAUTY was recorded in jig time, with Sheehy abandoning the principle of striving for perfection and instead following his initial instincts. The songs were recorded late at night and, to avoid waking his sleeping wife and daughter, are both mellow and calm. The album’s title is a quote from the French philosopher Simone Weil, whose writings influenced some of the material. Sheehy also cites The Velvet Underground, Suicide, Elvis and Brigid Mae Power as artists that guided his direction in both the lyrics and music.
There is a recurring theme of contentment and quiet optimism on many of the songs, as Sheehy absorbs the present moment and channels it into song. We Laugh More Than We Cry and Bless Your Gentle Soul are considered and contemplative, an acknowledgment of support offered when most needed. Other songs that also suggest self-examination and acceptance are I Have To Live This Way and Turn Back For Home.
Written late at night and best listened to late at night, this new album is a collection of uplifting songs that bring to mind Clem Snide and Damien Jurado at their most introspective. ‘Don’t be afraid, we’ll not be overcome’ repeats Sheehy at the end of the closing track Everything That Rises Must Converge. It’s a sentiment that fittingly sums up this most impressive album.
Review by Declan Culliton
Laura Veirs My Echo Bella Union
The latest album release from Portland, Oregon alt/folk singer songwriter Laura Veirs titled MY ECHO, is an addition to the eleven solo albums already in her war chest. Veirs was also one third of the ‘super group’ Case/Lang/Veirs, whose self-titled collaboration featured at the business end of albums selected as the best recordings of 2016 in a number of publications.
Veirs’ early musical career found her playing in the all-girl punk band Rair Kx, before exploring old time country and folk music and changing her own musical direction. Though loosely classified as a folk/country singer, her template has always been far wider than that, quite avant guard and always interesting.
Her writing has always been passioned and focused, her arrangements quirky, musically enterprising and often entrancing. Following her acoustic self-titled debut album in 1999, she became more adventurous with striking albums such as SALTBREAKERS in 2007 and - having being dropped by her record label - the sublime JULY FLAME, released on her own label Raven Marching Band back in 2010. Her latest recording matches the standard of both of those albums and for me, reads musically like the third leg of a trilogy alongside them. Lyrically, however, it takes a somewhat different direction. Inspired by a poetry writing club she and two others fashioned, she abandoned her customary style of putting lyrics to her guitar pieces and instead adapted her poetry to create the lyrics for the album.
The writing is also confessional and suggests some intense personal searching on her part. The album was written at a time when she was attempting to brush aside the inevitability of a failing marriage to fellow musician and producer Tucker Martine (Rosanne Cash, My Morning Jacket, Sufjan Stevens, Neko Case). Veirs and Martine, who produced the album, have since divorced. That subject matter is reflected and considered on the album.
Her opening line on the album is ‘I don’t know where I am going to’ from Freedom Feeling’ and the song articulates her predicament of feeling trapped and yearning for extrication. However, despite the harrowing and uncertain times that prevailed while the material was being constructed, Veirs’ presentation of the songs exclude any self-pity or censure.
The punchy and chipper Another Space and Time is a mid-tempo jazzy affair, strings and sax solo adding to its ambience. Memaloose Island recalls less stressful times and her more traditional folk leanings surface on the gentler songs such as All The Things and the piano led End Times. Burn Too Bright was written in memory of fellow musician and producer Richard Swift, who passed away in 2018. She signs out with Vapor Trails, which deals with the acceptance of time passing on.
Conceived at a difficult juncture, with Veirs’ personal life at a crossroads, MY ECHO contains her most unguarded writing to date. However, despite its testing subplot, you’re left with the impression of an artist more at peace with herself after the assignment. It’s an album that’s impeccably put together, beautifully arranged and a striking listen.
Review by Declan Culliton
Izzy Heltai Father Self Release
You are 23 years old and passing into adulthood. With you travels the baggage carried from a youth made complicated by issues surrounding sexual identity as a transgender person. Trying to gain recognition for an innate talent that has been quietly maturing, while fighting against popular opinion that would try to define you by your sexual preferences as something other.
Izzy Heltai grew up in Brookline, Massachusetts and wrote these nine songs between the ages of 19 and 23, seeking answers to his own questions regarding the true meaning of relationships, the vulnerability of love, feelings of depression and opening up to others. Many of the shared issues that concern us all on our various pathways through the maze of trying to live a meaningful life.
This debut album was produced by Sophie Buskin and the recording took place at Sleeper Cave Records in Williamsburg, Massachusetts. It is a work of great elegance and maturity and points towards a career that will continue to blossom and attract increasing interest.
Izzy plays guitar and sings, with additional vocals courtesy of Sophie Buskin. Micah Katz-Zeiger plays bass and electric guitar, with Garret Salazar on drums and Joel Helander on piano, Wurlitzer & Rhodes. Rebecca Branson Jones plays the pedal steel and Matthew Tornton contributes on cello.
With such an interesting array of instruments, you would expect a full sound, but the gentle playing of the ensemble lies in quiet unison and supports these emotional songs with just the right degree of nuance.
Not wanting to be defined by your sexual identity is something that is addressed in the track, To Talk About Yourself, while the question posed by The Stranger You’ve Become is one of how well do we really know anyone? Marching Song deals with the effects that depression can have upon others while Human looks at self-delusion and the stories that we tell ourselves.
Songbird refers to a feeling of being taken for granted in a friendship while wondering if there could be something more. Whet Your Appetite seems to ask for honesty in a relationship and the sad feelings involved in letting go. Anyone To Anybody is another song about unrequited love and feelings of frustration wrapped into devotion for another.
Although a number of these songs work through a sense of personal angst, there is a catharsis in the release of deep-seated feelings and emotions. The playing is gently sensitive and adding sweet melody around these words that serve to elevate the listening experience. Catacomb is sadness in solitude and looking for solace in the little things and the final song, Father, is a note to self and a wish to take things easier if only to connect;
‘And I could use a good touch, And maybe even your love, Could help me figure out what I’ve been trying to tell you for years.’
If indeed, “Art is found in the middle ground between intention and perception” then we are looking at a fully realised, quietly moving project that is very impressive and worthy of great praise.
Review by Paul McGee
Vincent Cross The Life & Times of James ‘The Rooster’ Corcoran Rescue Dog
This release is a song cycle about 19th Century Irish-American gang leader & colony chief, James “The Rooster” Corcoran and his life in America after emigrating from Ireland at the start of the Famine years in 1945. In Ireland it is referred to as the Great Hunger (An Gorta Mór), as there was plenty of food supply available, but the English authorities choose to export this for profit, leaving the starving Irish people to die /emigrate as a result of the failure of the potato crop.
Corcoran was a distant relative of Vincent Cross and with his interest raised by newspaper archives and old stories handed down, he embarked upon his own journey of discovery in search of the legend and myth that surrounded this man who became the champion of the Irish immigrant class during the 19th Century. Traditional Irish airs and arrangements are adopted on four of the songs here as Cross uses his creative licence to imagine what life must have been like for a young Irishman taking the boat to America and working his way from New Orleans up to New York City. In establishing himself as a spokesman for squatters in and around the notorious 5-corners area of the city, Corcoran also became a truckman, almost a century before the infamous teamster unions of the 1920’s and the reign of Jimmy Hoffa.
The songs trace Corcoran from his gang activities and his love of his beautiful wife, Kathleen Barnwell, to his longing to return home to Ireland and his ultimate death at the age of 81, never having left NYC again.
Cross is a multi-instrumentalist and plays bouzouki, chromatic concertina, minstrel banjo, bodhran, dulcimer, mandolin and mandocello. Guests include Shane Kerwin on tin whistle & bodhran, Claire Bonass on vocals (Come Ye Ladies & Ye Gentlemen), Erica Marie Mancini on accordion (A Stranger I Came) and Sam Harmet on mandolin (A Stranger I Came).
The project was produced by Cross and recorded in Queens, NYC. Six songs were written by Cross, plus his input on traditional arrangements Albert W. Hicks, Creole Girl, Farewell Sweet Lovely Kathleen and LCaoineadh na dTrí Muire/Off to California, an Irish lament and slow hornpipe that is both reflective and soulful. A Man After Me Own Heart is an imagined tale of Corcoran’s fishing background in Ireland.
The original songs sit easily alongside the adapted public domain songs to create a timeless quality of the passing decades and all that surrounds a life in the telling of old stories, like Albert W. Hicks, hanged for piracy in Manhattan and a known serial killer. Red Haired Mary Corcoran is about a family member, sister or daughter (?), who strutted her stuff in the local district and Handsome Harry Carlton a member of the gang who was the last man to be hanged on the Island of Manhattan. Farewell Sweet Lovely Katherine portrays a sense of Corcoran’s grief over the loss of his wife. Corcoran was the father of ten children and was ‘not a Paddy, but an Irish gentleman.’
Cross has been recording music since 2001 and is very experienced in all aspects of the business, both touring extensively and recording in the studio. He is a fine musician and the ensemble playing here is very appealing on all fronts. An interesting release and very much in the traditional Folk heritage.
Review by Paul McGee