Jim Caligiuri, Austin Chronicle, December 2001 - Four star review

-Fred Dellar, Q Magazine (England) - Four star review

Meet Crooked Still, the hot young alternative bluegrass group on a mission to bend the boundaries of traditional music. The unlikely combination of banjo, cello, and double bass drives this low lonesome band, whose soaring vocals and high-wire solos have enraptured audiences all over North America and Ireland since 2001.

Four very unique musical personalities merge to form Crooked Still. Aoife O'Donovan's refined, sultry vocals float over Rushad Eggleston's rumbling cello riffs, Dr. Gregory Liszt's futuristic four-finger banjo rolls and Corey DiMario's pulsing bass lines. The resulting acoustic fusion can warp a traditional American tune to the brink of unrecognizability without sacrificing the authenticity of the original sources. "It's almost like we're going back and making imaginary history," says Eggleston, whose versatile cello style has already sparked a revolution among young cellists. "What if the 1920s Appalachian musicians could've heard the music we hear now?"

What you'll find on Shaken By A Low Sound is precisely what Crooked Still sets out to achieve. Traditional tunes taken to the next level and beyond. Ms. O'Donovan's voice is beyond angelic and the mix with frenetic cello work and other acoustic accompaniment is simply wondrous.

With Haas and Clarridge, the band has proven themselves to be even more adventurous, breathing their cosmic fire into old songs. "When Rushad left, we wanted to move in new directions," O'Donovan says. "Brittney adds another female presence to the band; I can hear my voice in her fiddling. Tristan has a refined cello tone, with a powerful, restrained energy. They bring a fresh outlook to the arrangements that keeps the music exciting."

"We rehearsed for a few days before we recorded," Clarridge says. "We'd listen to a source recording, strip the songs to the bone and build an arrangement incorporating everyone's ideas. It's fun to see how many directions you can take a song." Everyone brought material for consideration. "As we worked on the songs, we realized there was a lot of loss and mortality in the lyrics," banjo player Greg Liszt adds. "You can't make a folk album without delving into what's happening now and we were surprised at how current the songs sounded. On 'Captain, Captain' a woman asks what happened to her lover and the Captain replies 'he dropped down dead in the gulf.' It's a 400-year-old line, but it gives you chills."

Still Crooked is an ensemble effort of inspired music making that moves the bands' impossible- to-pigeonhole style in new directions while honoring their folk roots. "It's hard to pin down our music," bass player Corey DiMario says. "We play improvised old time music, bluegrass, folk and our own songs within the broad context of a string band. Like a lot of today's bands, we have modern and traditional influences that confuse the boundaries. We want to keep blurring those lines to make something all our own."

The Evening Sorrow was recorded in an old house across from a church in the struggling city of Holyoke, Massachusetts. The record comes after several years immersed in the vibrant music scene of Northampton, Massachusetts.

With The Evening Sorrow, Crommett sits down on the rug, opens a box of photographs, looks at each, and then throws them into the fireplace. Only the present remains; the love we hear in "Bright," the "it doesn't matter" spirit of "Green Depression Glass"... they replace difficult memories with melodies. It makes sense that Crommett chose to surround himself with friends in the making of this record; it releases it to them -- to the weeping pedal steel and cello, to the drums that crack open "Basement Friends," to the harmonies that drive "Oranges and Reds," creating a sound that is anything but inward or self-conscious. It is wide open like the sound of My Morning Jacket and Nick Drake; it is melodically focused, emotional and genuine, like the worn-out mix tapes of Simon & Garfunkel, Leonard Cohen and Neil Young that populate Dennis' car.

Crommett chose two musical peers whose sensibilities were different but would serve the record well: Jose Ayerve (The Pernice Brothers), a songwriter/producer who has been called "remarkably adept at casting somber moods while rocking incessantly;" and Bruce Tull, whose alt-country pedigree and quiet creativity helped create the mood of The Evening Sorrow. Dennis wanted to surrender some of this deeply personal, darkly vibrant music to the ears of his trusted friends, and allow them to play and sing what they heard. The result is from deep inside Crommett, but not insular, not arrogant.

The album is the urgent and beautiful purging of a young man's obsession with his past. Gone are the nights sitting alone on the bedroom floor with a tape recorder; it is morning. And as he sings on track 3, "Morning takes away the evening sorrow."

Though she may thrive on the road, Keep Your Silver Shined shifts the light to Ms. Sproule's domestic life in Charlottesville, VA, with husband and fellow musician Paul Curreri. The record includes a duet by the two, Eloise & Alex, a Curreri original.

You could call Keep Your Silver Shined my Getting Married Album, I guess. Being in love with Paul Curreri, in love with Virginia, deciding to settle down with both and figuring out how to make it all work. Ours ain't the most steady lifestyle -- a fact that doesn't always jive with the healthy, future-planning parts of being married. But we're happy, both writing, touring and getting the bills paid.

Sproule's previous effort, Upstate Songs (City Salvage Records) was included in Rolling Stone's Critics Top Albums of 2003. Critic Julie Gerstein called the record, "perhaps the sweetest and most honest folk-pop album recorded this year," and added, "Sproule's vocal and lyrical beauty is unmatched."

Describing her girlhood on a 1960s-founded commune in rural Virginia, and the rope hammocks made there, Sproule sings in Silver's "Does the Day Feel Long," "All my thinking back has been strung up between two tall trees / Some kind of language learned in the country / Grapes filled with a million seeds each.

Born to hippie parents on a commune in Kingston, Ontario, Sproule claims dual citizenship with both Canada and the US. After moving between private, public and home schooling, she eventually left high school, recorded her first record, and began touring nationally -- all before the age of eighteen.

Keep Your Silver Shined presents an honest and sparkling portrait of Devon Sproule: candid, poetic and right at home.

Touring and recording since 2003, The Hunger Mountain Boys have released three full-length albums and one vinyl single on their own Old-Fi record label. Their songwriting has won them national recognition, and their music has taken them from coast to coast, Canada and Europe. Their spirited performances of eclectic traditional American music as well as their own compositions have put them on stages with many roots-based artists from Taj Mahal to Doc Watson and Ralph Stanley to Kathy Mattea, among others. With a fourth album scheduled to be released late in 2007, The Hunger Mountain boys continue to tour the nation.

Hungrytown was recorded up and down the east coast, between gigs, by way of their mobile studio, Song Catcher Recording, recalling the semi-fictionalized film about musical folklorist, Olive Dame Campbell. Rebecca and Ken believe in bringing the studio to the musician, and as a result, the album's recording spaces include a converted barn in New York's Catskills, a double-wide in the Blue Ridge mountains of central Virginia, and an old brick and wood meeting house on a Vermont hillside. Among the many guest players on Hungrytown are Michael Merenda and Ruth Ungar Merenda (banjo and fiddle), who comprise the core of the celebrated folk supergroup, the Mammals, as well as Zack Deming (banjo), Charles Frazier (guitar), Donnie Shifflett (bass) and Jeff Vogelgesang (guitar and mandolin), who make up one of the south's top bluegrass bands, the Virginia Ramblers.

Rebecca Hall, who has a knack for penning tunes that sound like time-tested classics, wrote most of the songs on the album. She has been dubbed "a new folk classicist" by the Boston Herald, and her composition "Hungrytown Road" won second prize at the Minnesota Folk Festival's New Folk Songwriting Contest in 2005. That same year, legendary Nashville songsmith David Olney, who has written for Johnny Cash, Emmylou Harris and Linda Rondstadt, included his version of Rebecca's "O Lord" on his highly-acclaimed 2005 release, Migration. Her clear, haunting alto has prompted Roger McGuinn to rave, "I love the sound of Rebecca Hall's voice. There's a sweetness, and a worldly wisdom, in perfect balance."

Ken Anderson, who produced and arranged Hungrytown, plays multiple instruments throughout the recording, including drums, percussion, Hammond B3, harmonica, bass and guitar as well as singing harmony with Rebecca. His distinctive production style is the result of an eclectic musical education, performing in countless punk, soul, rock, and 60s-style pop bands in New York City and elsewhere. The result is no purist folk album, but a recording that demonstrates a reverence for American songcraft spanning many shades and decades. Lately, Rebecca and Ken have been combining their writing talents, and their co-written ballad, "Lucille, Lucille," won third prize at the Great Waters Folk Festival Songwriting Contest in 2007.

Signature's review: Lissa Schneckenburger's eponymous album begins, appropriately, with two original fiddle tunes. These tunes are not only well written, but flawlessly played. Lissa brings together a group of top-notch musicians on this record, including bassist Corey DiMario (Crooked Still), guitarist Keith Murphy (Nightingale), and percussionist Stefan Amidon (Assembly/Popcorn Behavior). Amongst all of this other talent, however, Lissa and her fiddle remain at the heart of this album. The first set of tunes leads seamlessly into a traditional song, "The Irish Girl." In addition to Lissa's fiery, skilled fiddle-playing, she writes tunes that feel at home next to traditional numbers, and confidently performs as if all of these works belong in the same catalog. In the hands of Lissa's expert composition and fiddling style, they most certainly do. --Rebecca Lay

"Lissa's fiddling is artful, skillful, inventive and full of feeling. I had to listen again and again!" Folk Roots raved, "Lissa blows out the cobwebs in no uncertain fashion... Lissa Schneckenburger's name is one we ought to be hearing more of."

Song contains ten timeless ballads that trace as far back as the eighteenth century that Schneckenburger carefully set to modern arrangements. "There is currently a lot of focus on traditional American music from the South," she explains "and many bands are exploring and recording that repertoire, but no one is getting to hear the amazing wealth of traditional music from the North. This is my first attempt at getting some of that music out there for people to enjoy. It is really important that we represent these two essential aspects of New England's traditional music heritage equally. The songs and dance tunes both combine to create an overview of the culture and the sound of traditional music from the Northeast. The CDs Song and Dance are two halves of a whole that describes a musical heritage I am very proud of." The second recording, Dance, is scheduled for release in 2009.

Melvern Taylor is the most unlikely of pop geniuses. A middle age guy sporting thick glasses, pork pie hat and a ukulele, Taylor proves himself to be one of the most unique and tuneful songwriters around. Fabuloso is a tour de force of classic song styles, from the Everly Brothers shuffle of "Bettie Lou" to the country heartbreak of "Working Stiff" and the Beach Boys inspired summer pop of "Beer Cans." There isn't a weak track on the entire CD. Highly recommended. --Jim Olsen

Melvern Taylor writes happy songs about miserable people. His instrument of choice is the ukulele. They go together like milk and cookies. He learned to play guitar with an Eagles song book. He started writing songs in the 7th grade. Mostly they were about dead cats or this girl named Emily Tilghman. So far Melvern has released 3 records, Handsome Bastard, The Spider and the Barfly and Fabuloso. Slaid Cleaves covered Melvern's song "Working Stiff" on his last record. Melvern recently signed a Publishing Deal with a company called Primary Wave. They are a top notch bunch of cats.

We at Signature think Melvern is a top-notch cat, too. Who else could write (and get away with) a love song called "You and Me and My Ukelele?" His latest record, Fabuloso, is filled with witty, intelligent pop songs to which we can't help but hum along.

Although the name, The Honeymoon Agenda, was thought up as a rhyming pronunciation guide for their last name, Merenda, it also describes the happy blend of work and play that went into the project.

When producer Jose Ayerve (Pernice Brothers, Winterpills, Spouse) offered to record their new album as a wedding gift, the newlyweds excitedly hit the home studio, where they found great joy in the simplicity of writing and recording as a duo. That joy continues to grow with each performance of these captivating, new original songs and classic favorites by Lou Reed, Bob Dylan, Etta James, and a few of their good friends.

In 2008, Mike & Ruthy are touring festivals, clubs, and house concerts in their native Northeast and beyond.

Always an ironically detached romantic, this time he has plunged into it and committed himself fully to the terrors of the lovestruck heart. There's little irony in these songs, but plenty of darkness. The same knack for hooks and melody that made the Maggies a singalong kind of modern-rock band are present here. The whole affair was recorded in a very demo-ey fashion right in Philip's home studio; many rough edges are present, and the production is minimal. There is nothing like a well-placed mic.

This album and its companion (Honey in the Chemicals) go beautifully together. So, skip today's dose of anti-bipolar medication, pour a stiff one, put your hand on your heart and some headphones on, and fall down the rabbit hole of love again. And again.

Sticking with his basic acoustic guitar/stacked vocals/drum machine/piano approach, Philip laid down the tracks before a well-placed mic, mixed them carefully, and left it at that. It's fantastic, whatever he did. Several years in pretentious art schools in the 1980s somehow gave him the gift of knowing what to leave out, if nothing else. The spareness is alluring, and his writing has never been more concise, focused and bittersweet.

This is different territory than Price's stuff with The Maggies, which relied almost solely on the gift of the hook and a rather pleasingly opaque confessional lyricism. No less confessional, this time there seems to be a fiercely compelling object at the center of it. This time around, also, sonically, Price pays his dues to all the 70s soft-pop that poured through his ears as a child; everything from Cat Stevens, Elton John to Bread. Lovely. - Bill Eleven

Yes, rap.

Woody Guthrie's pre-rap talking blues never blossomed into a genre. And it never came close to the lyrical complexity and stylistic variation of hip hop rapping.

But what if it had?

Meet the Deadly Gentlemen, whose wildly original debut The Bastard Masterpiece proudly defies the stereotypes of both banjo and rap to define an organic, captivating, and totally novel approach to folk music.

"Trust us, this is not what you are expecting," says Greg Liszt, the band's banjo player and vocalist, who recently completed an international tour with Bruce Springsteen and a Ph. D. in Molecular Biology from MIT.

Each of the ten songs on The Bastard Masterpiece is narrative, topical, and firmly rooted in either traditional or contemporary folk themes. But each song brings its own wit, edge, and attitude to bear our common experiences and fantasies:

The violent Wild West; the metropolitan workday; the end of the damned world; that time you drank too much; the baddest hobo ever to ride rails; ghosts coming back to the world for their living lovers; regret, seizing you, you'll do anything to shake it off.

This album features Greg Liszt (Bruce Springsteen; Crooked Still) on banjo and vocals; Josh Pinkham (Frank Vignola Quintet) on mandolin; Michael Barnett (Jesse McReynolds; Tony Trischka) on fiddle; and Sam Grisman (David Grisman Bluegrass Experience) on double bass.

In many ways Lantana is Herring's re-imaging of the Gothic South, with a rich alto voice that soothes the listener even as she addresses difficult subjects. Herring has a journalist's eye for detail, a poet's sense of scale and language, and a life-long Southerner's understanding of the issues that shape the culture below the Mason- Dixon line. Herring tackles poignant themes of womanhood in "Fair and Tender Ladies", "Stone Cold World" and "Song For Fay." Herring also expertly throws her hat in the ring of the long-standing murder ballad tradition, this time representing Susan Smith in the song "Paper Gown." Herring's commitment to uncovering the truth in her songs led fellow artist Dar Williams to call Herring "the elusive real thing." There is no artifice on Lantana. It's an album full of delights, lyrically and musically. And just like Caroline Herring, her new album is the real thing.

"I just finished listening to Accidentals of the West and it's great-everything sounds purposeful but not predictable. It's great, just great." -Chris Smither

"simply beautiful. the melodies are plain spoken and invite you to follow; then they lead to some unexpected places & eerily familiar tunes you've never heard before. not quite standards, not quite old fiddle tunes, not quite blues tunes... but from somewhere near where each of those things come from." -Peter Mulvey

"Beautiful... It's another tip of the iceberg he's been building all along, clear and lucid. Eight of the compositions are his, one co-written with Kris Delmhorst, one by Kurt Cobain, and one by John Coltrane. The measure of his writing is that his own tune, "Truro", sits between Cobain and Coltrane, and it holds its own there, a marvel of compact meaning, combining surprise and inevitability. Words are poor tools here. This is like trying to describe the smell of the front hall of your childhood home, or the color of water. It's guitar-based music, but it's not guitar music. It's music. I don't even know what kind. Ellington said there were only two kinds: good and bad. This is the good kind. I think Ellington would have agreed with me on that." -Peter Mulvey

Lush where it might have been dry, riotous where it could have been reverent, Strange Conversation releases each poem into the air and gives it rein to go where it will, with a result that’'s anything but academic. Walt Whitman's cosmic hurrah becomes a sunny pop anthem. George Eliot's thoughts on the solace of art slide into a woozy Dixie shuffle. Rumi's Sufi musings unfurl into a last-call, all-hands-on-deck singalong. Delmhorst delivers the songs with the easy, confident phrasing and wide textural range of a jazz singer.

Transcendent in every sense, Strange Conversation bridges literary periods, forms, and musical genres to create an original album truly greater than the sum of its parts; a joyful collection of songs that revels in the interplay of language and melody. The poems - some many centuries old - feel immediate and accessible because they speak to what it is to be alive and human, questions addressed through poetry and song from time immemorial. This is the ‘"strange conversation"’ of the title, the eternally ongoing dialog among artists of all kinds, spanning centuries and continents, languages and cultures; and in which no one ever has the final word.

Unwilling to rely on her golden voice alone, Ms. Jewell is also an accomplished guitar player and songwriter. Never content to stand still geographically or artistically, she has been part of the music scenes in Boise, Santa Fe, Venice Beach, the Berkshires, and now Boston, where the Herald referred to her as an Americana gem. Probably because of her geographic wanderings, her overall sound is distinctive but not easy to pin down. In the music world, you are Blues or Folk or Country mostly because someone says you are. Eilen Jewell is both all and none of these at the same time. New artists are also described in sounds-like terms which can be more of a curse than a blessing. (All new Bob Dylans please form a line on the left and around the block.) Though any of the Boundary County songs would fit just right on playlists that include singers from Gillian Welch to Memphis Minnie to Lucinda Williams to Neil Young, as far as who she sounds like, suffice it to say that Eilen Jewell is the kind of artist people will cite in the not-too-distant future to help define how others sound.

No stranger to adversity, Ms. Jewell lost the previous album she recorded, a collection of covers and originals, when the studio burned down and the masters were destroyed. Boundary County, rather than being an attempted resurrection of the previous effort, heads confidently in new directions, whether its the barroom stomp of "Mess Around," the rock-steady "Back to Dallas," the beautiful dirge "Till You Lay Down Your Heavy Load," the Masters of War-like "The Flood," the Harvest whine of "Boundary County," the tent-meeting shuffle of "Gotta Get Right," the cowboy blues of "Fourth Degree," or the highway blues of "Blow It All Away." Her first-rate backing band on this recording made at Chris Rival's Middleville Studio includes drummer Jason Beek, also of Whoa! Man! Jesus!, fiddler Daniel Kellar and upright bass player Johnny Sciascia, both former Tarbox Ramblers, dobro/lap steel legend Jerry Miller of The Spurs, and Greg Glassman of Tastes Like Gravy String Band on banjo.

This is the story of Eilen (rhymes with feelin') Jewell and her new album Letters From Sinners and Strangers, which promises to show the rest of the world what the buzz is about.

Jewell's achingly hushed style and intimate grasp of roots music's are revealed in the CD's provocative, melodic originals and timeless country and blues classics. Set to a swaying, irrepressible groove, the subdued emotion in her soft soprano feels like music straining beneath skin. And the band evokes classic country, folk and swing without feeling nostalgic.

Nothing about roots is retro in Eilen Jewell's universe.

Ghost Repeaters are empty radio stations scattered around the country to re-broadcast demographically tailored playlists, endless echoes of American market culture, from thousands of miles away. Epidemic sameness, big-box stores, and the retail news cycle of ghost prisoners and God on Our Side create the context in which the songs on Ghost Repeater unfold a story of love and uncertainty.

Written over the course of a year in which Foucault married, Ghost Repeater juxtaposes a personal narrative of hope and joyfulness against the wider story of the times, in a series of travelogues and dreamscapes. Words like bloom and fade, truth and mercy, dream and memory recur through the album to create a sort of grammar, a palette of colors that Foucault and Ramsey merge with dark washes of electric guitar and vocals hushed or plaintive, in a visionary portrait of modern Americana.

It’s a natural pairing. Ramsey'’s cool economy of phrase the perfect compliment to Foucault’'s elegant lines and weatherbeaten drawl. The recording itself was something of a homecoming, with Foucault traveling back to the Midwest from Massachusetts where he’ has lived the past few years, and bringing home the songs he'’d written, to record them with Ramsey'’s longtime collaborators.

Ghost Repeater features full band arrangements but hews close to the line of Foucault’'s previous albums (Miles from the Lightning, 2001; and Stripping Cane, 2004), with darkly intimate songs and rich language, framed this time around by Bo Ramsey’s signature electric guitar work in a series of country rockers and dark blues. It was a natural progression for Foucault - whose first two records explored the landscape and characters of his native Midwest in spare and largely acoustic terms - to broaden the focus of the music and the subject matter by incorporating a rhythm section and training his sights on not only the intimate but the wider world; the personal and the profound.

In addition to Bo Ramsey’'s inimitable sound, Foucault has the backing of Rick Cicalo and Steve Hayes (Greg Brown) on rhythm, along with special guest appearances by Iowa legend Dave Moore on harp and accordion, Eric Heywood (Son Volt, Richard Buckner) on pedal steel, and Kris Delmhorst on backing vocals.

Against the broadcast echoes of an America long gone, Foucault lays out the particulars of love in a country contending with its own ghost. In songs of love and empire, dream and memory; Ghost Repeater delivers the honesty of country, the rawboned desperation of blues, and the simplicity of folk to achieve a document that’ is timeless and poignant.

Peter Mulvey began as a self-described "city kid" from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He played, wrote, and sang in bands while studying theatre at Marquette University. After graduating, he traveled to Ireland, where he learned the trade of busker on the streets of Dublin. Returning to the U.S. a few years later, he settled in Boston, building an audience through street and subway performing, while also immersing himself in the thriving musical community. Mulvey has released three other studio albums for Signature Sounds; The Trouble With Poets (2000), Kitchen Radio (2004), and The Knuckleball Suite (2006). Mulvey also collaborated with fellow label-mates Kris Delmhorst and Jeffrey Foucault to release Redbird in 2003 (with label-mates Kris Delmhorst and Jeffrey Foucault. His 2001 CD, Ten Thousand Mornings, is an album of cover songs recorded entirely in the subways of Boston. MOJO described the album as "simultaneously Mulvey's homage to his one-time training ground and a beautifully atmospheric record of gifted interpretations."

In addition to the critical acclaim that his recorded works have brought him, though, Peter Mulvey is also highly regarded (and respected by his fellow musicians) as a serious disciple of the road. Touring rigorously, year in and year out, has made him who and what he is. Traveling from Ireland to Anchorage and all points in between, whether playing solo, duo, or with a full-on rock back, live performance is what defines his work and is where he shines.

Mulvey's newest release, Notes from Elsewhere, brings it all back to where it all started - the man, his guitar and the song.

The Knuckleball Suite was recorded in two and a half days, with a cadre of world-class improvising musicians who had not rehearsed a single note of the songs together. Each track is a warm, large-format photograph of a gifted musical posse, caught in the very moment of Making It All Up. Out of thin air. For real.

That's Knuckleball Suite: now just try and pin it down.