Nick Shoulders - Refugia Blues - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

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.

Wielding an ethereal croon and masterful whistle crafted from a lifetime chasing lizards through the Ozark hills, Nick Shoulders is a living link to roots of country music with a penchant for the absurd. Combining his family's deep ties to regional traditional singing with his years of playing to crowded street corners, Nick has sought to forge a hybridized form of raucously clever country music; born of forgotten rocky hollers and bred to confront the tensions of the 21st century South. As evidenced by his surreal album art and anachronistic songwriting, Nick's creative output is steeped in the complicated history of his beloved home of rural Arkansas, but crafted as a conscious rebuke of country music's blind allegiance to historical seats of power and repression. With a kind word and a mean yodel, Nick hopes to put the 'Try' in country. A cry out against the withering void of listless Americana, 'Okay, Crawdad', is the fledgling full length album from Nick and company. A two-step laden dose of indignation, loss and profound elation, the album is inspired as much by the chaos and decadence of south Louisiana as it is the rural sounds of yesteryear from which it sprang. Despite a pandemic inspired relocation to his home in the Natural State, New Orleans and it's community helped meld the forces at play on the album; pitting an adherence to tradition and refusal to conform against each other with grand results.

Released 2023. Gatefold wallet-style package with one disc. Comes with 6 fold out art booklet with lyrics. All Bad, the latest album from Nick Shoulders, ultimately encapsulates everything that makes Shoulders' inimitable form of country music so vital a heady balance of dazzling musicianship and punk defiance, coupled with gritty eccentricity and a generational connection to the roots of the genre. With a singing style inherited from his family's vocal lineage, Nick's songs achieve the rare feat of imparting difficult truths while inciting a certain joyful abandon, balancing a sound forged by years of hard travel with a heartfelt reverence for the origins of country music. In the spirit of Hazel Dickens and Jimmy Driftwood, the incisive yet wildly jubilant All Bad vocally objects to the reckless destruction of the natural landscape and development run rampant, while still offering plenty of joy and dance-ready rhythms. Spanning a variety of early country styles, the album's infectious harmonies shine alongside everything from jangling cajun waltzes to surf-rock infused bluesy ballads-all tied together by a voice seemingly out of place in this century, yet ever ready to speak up about it's problems. Released via Gar Hole Records (a tag founded and co-owned by Shoulders), All Bad marks the first LP made with his longtime band, the Okay Crawdad, since 2019's premier full-length Okay, Crawdad and their subsequent pandemic-imposed hiatus. After writing most of the album from the front seat of a tour van, the Fayetteville, AR-based musician and bandmates Grant D'Aubin (harmonies/bass), Cheech Moosekian (drums) and Jack Studer (lead guitar) recorded the album in a home studio on the banks of the Mississippi river with New Orleans collaborators Ross Farbe and Sam Doores. Surrounded by a singing style passed down from a time before microphones, Nick's childhood of bird call