John (Biscuits and Gravy) Davy's Blog – February 2011 Archive (21)

 http://kg.kevingordon.net/

http://flyinshoes.ning.com/profile/KevinGordon

          Nashville-based Kevin Gordon hails from Louisiana and has had a twenty year long career as songwriter and performer, earning praise and respect from across the music community in the process. Salvage And…

 www.betterangelsradio.com

        Better Angels Radio brings you rock music with a country heart from New York-based Pete Sinjin. Experimentation with style seems to be all the rage these days and I can think of a whole stack of really good artists/bands who defy easy categorisation. Some manage the trick of being…

 www.thelaws.ca

              Michele and John Law are a husband and wife duo from Ontario, writing and singing their own brand of modern acoustic country. They've recently got themselves a songwriting deal in Nashville and, from this new album, it's easy to see why. Some songs have a very strong echo of the Lady Antebellum style,…

www.reverbnation.com/davidlatto

          David Latto comes from Fife but I think his heart is somewhere in the wide open spaces of the American West. He played in a band for a long while but is currently re-orientating his musical career to answer the call of his cowboy heart and this four track cd is…

www.johnshipe.com 

Recently re-located to California from Oregon, John Shipe has had something of a wanderer's musical career, trying out all sorts of styles over the last two and a bit decades. Currently, he says, he alternates between electric and…

 www.dannyschmidt.com

         So, straight after Carrie Elkin's lovely new album, here comes her partner, Danny Schmidt, with his own new release on Red House Records. Danny is very much a folk singer-songwriter in the James Taylor tradition and this comes over more clearly than ever with Man Of Many Moons which has a…

www.carrieelkin.com

There's been a lot of good new music in 2011 already, but I think Carrie Elkin's new one is my album of the year so far. Her first release for Red House Records, there is something very special in the fact that Call It My Garden is all but formally a twin release with Danny Schmidt's Man Of Many Moons. Danny Schmidt is Carrie Elkin's partner and…

http://music.bowthayer.com

As a fuzzy guitar riff spins you into the opening song, there's something about the raucous energy and apocalyptic tone that sounds very familiar; it took me a while but Bow Thayer has…

www.myspace.com/songsofrobinjames

No matter how loud the hubbub, sometimes it's the quiet voice that makes itself heard; Robin James is certainly a quiet voice - this new collection of songs sounds like a whispered…

www.kingkingblues.com

Alan Nimmo and his brother Stevie, as The Nimmo Brothers, have been strong fixtures on the British blues scene for a decade or so but they both seem to have felt it was time to spread their wings a bit. So, whilst brother Stevie headed off to Texas to record a…

www.adroitrecords.com

Adroit Records is a new venture by Nashville producer Jim Tract which seeks to celebrate the folk who write the songs that give the stars their hits. I'm not too sure about tacking the Americana label onto this collection but I guess folk don't take that tag too seriously…

www.jefftalmadge.com    

About eleven months ago I posted a "catch-up" review, still available on this blog, of Jeff Talmadge's previous two albums and mentioned that there was a new one in the pipeline. Well, here it is,  and pretty much everything that I wrote last time round applies to this new work.  Jeff is a Texan…

http://www.billycrain.com 

Billy Crain has been playing southern rock pretty much since it was invented and is currently playing guitar for The Outlaws. Being a Nashville native, however, he has one foot in the country camp and in recent years he developed a career as a country/pop songwriter. In all that three decades or so though, he hadn't ever released a solo album so…

www.jjgrey.com

JJ Grey comes from Florida and this is his fifth album in a career getting on for two decades long:  if this album is typical, he's one of the most soulful bluesmen you're likely to come across. It seems that his band, Mofro, are something of a rolling collection of players but it looks like the core of the band have stayed…

www.99browndogs.com

This is not Brendan McKinney's first album  - there are a couple before this - but it does represent a fresh start, being his first release for Adroit Records. That fresh start probably explains why the songs here amount to something of a retrospective, being written or co-written by Brendan over a five…

http://www.reverbnation.com/shipcote

         Shipcote hails from Newcastle ( where else?) and has been a stlawart of the music scene in…

http://www.deadrockwest.com

Californian group Dead Rock West are built around Cindy Wasserman and Frank Lee Drennen. They clearly have no intention of being too constrained by a particular style, being happily categorised as Americana, alt-country or roots rock but who cares, anyway? Question is, how good are they? The answer is that they're plenty good enough to be…

www.theginnsisters.com

Tiffani and Brit Ginn (pronounced like the drink, I believe) have been singing together since they were children in Texas. These days they're mostly to be found backing up Fred Eaglesmith when he tours. He has now returned the favour by producing this new cd using his own band as the core musicians.…

www.lynnehanson.com

Third album in for Ottawa's Lynne Hanson and from the first bars of the first song, you know you're in for something good here. Produced in Toronto by multi instrumentalist David Baxter, my initial reaction to the sound that he's created was that it was a very good recreation of the sound that Malcolm Burn has made for Emmylou Harris in recent years. It's…

www.markwynn.com 

www.bosscaine.com

Two young-ish country and blues-influenced musicians from York (England) Mark Wynn and Boss Caine  have made the unusual move of contributing half an hour or so of material each to a joint cd and I guess there's…