Mariachi Reyna De Los Angeles - Mariachi Reyna De Los Angeles - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Mariachi Real de San Diego - Mariachi Classics [COMPACT DISCS] date 06/02/2009

With 'Home on the Rage,' Nick Shoulders swaps the raucous, sweat-stained Honkabilly of New Orleans for the rocky solitude of the Ozark up-country. The energy is subdued, but what the record lacks in rowdiness, it makes up for in sheer determination. Recorded during the late summer months of 2020, the album is the first solo/acoustic attempt by Nick, with limited accompaniment from 'Okay Crawdad' collaborator Grant D'Aubin appearing alongside a showcase of Nick's multi-instrumental and genre-bending original songs. Alongside the expected pained warbles and indignant yodels are songs about profound isolation, permanent disruption, and the apocalyptic anxiety that marks the album as a product of the red-state COVID-19 zeitgeist. With 'Home on the Rage,' Nick continues his dissection of American traditional music both in form and content. By drawing upon his background in old-time banjo, deep south gospel singing, blues harmonica, and proto-rock & roll one-man-bands, Nick has furnished this sound collage of southern dissent with a variety of influences. Using ancestral singing techniques and archaic instrumentation, Nick crafts songs that address the overwhelming crises of country music overcommercialization, insincerity, a default to unquestioning patriotism and power worship, and a obsession with InchSouthernessInch that is primarily concerned with a sort of performative rurality as a measure of authenticity. All the while, offering candid and painful personal journeys into the realms of grief and confusion. Even with it's serious subject matter, 'Home on the Rage' remains a moving and uplifting listen. As always, Nick manages to balance his music's weighty themes with a playful wit, an instinctual musicianship, and a songwriting arch that bends towards hope, for the country and the humanity of it's occupants.

All Hands_Make Light is the newly minted duo of Ariel Engle (La Force, Broken Social Scene) and Efrim Manuel Menuck (Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Thee Silver Mt. Zion). AH_ML weaves these two unique voices through lustrous tendrils of blown-out tones and drones, expanding on Menuck's eponymous modular synth work of recent years, imbued with an additionally searing, soulful warmth and melodicism through Engle's singing. The result is a wholly compelling and spellbinding album of preternaturally genre-bending sonics and songwriting a sort of electronic shoegaze suffused with freak-folk, kosmische, darkwave and post-industrial, conjuring traditionals sung in the haze of earliest light accompanied by overdriven circuit boards powered with ungrounded wires, thrumming with alternately tender and serrated beauty. Sleepless anxiety/euphoria and a sense of somatic channeling is vital to these songs InchI wanted the melodies to be immediate and to surprise me, not a laboured process; it's about being a weather vane, guided by preconscious impulsesInch says Engle. For Menuck, the record started Inchwith an idea of making a long thing about 'THE DAWN', the different weights of it's radiance, the way it kisses our dumb faces when we rise and leave the night behind, the heaviness of that light when you haven't slept.Inch With guests Jessica Moss (Thee Silver Mt. Zion, Big Brave) on violins and Liam O'Neil (Suuns) on drums.