Blake Mills - Break Mirrors 2010

Blake Mills is a guitarist, producer, and recording artist. He is best known as a session musician, having performed on recordings by Kid Rock, the Avett Brothers, Conor Oberst, Norah Jones, Dixie Chicks, Zucchero, P!nk, Lana Del Rey, Dangermouse, Paulo Nutini, and Weezer.

After he left, the band shortened its name to Dawes. Millsbecame a touring guitarist for Jenny Lewis. He also served as a hired gun for Band of Horses, Lucinda Williams, andJulian Casablancas.Mills began his musical career as a founding member ofSimon Dawes with Taylor Goldsmith. They recorded and released the EP What No One Hears in 2005, and the 2006 full-length Carnivore.

His strategy worked. He co-produced Jesca Hoop's The House That Jack Built in 2011, and produced fiddler Sarah Watkins sophomore release, Sun Midnight Sun. He produced, co-produced, and/or played on several tracks by several other musicians as well as contributing to compilations. His co-production and performance of "Oh Well," with Billy Gibbons and Matt Sweeney, on the tribute album Just Tell Me That You Want Me: A Tribute to Fleetwood Mac, was considered by many the set's highlight.Until that time, Millsnever really considered himself a solo artist. His first recording on his own, Break Mirrors, was released with the intention of securing more session work and becoming a producer. The end result was widely acclaimed for its overall originality in writing, arranging, and producing.

Mills began recording his sophomore offering Heigh Ho at Capitol's Ocean Way studio (the room was built for Frank Sinatra), with a host of guests that included Fiona Apple, Jon Brion, Benmont Tench, Don Was, and Jim Keltner. The album was released in September of 2014. AMG.

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The Walkabouts - Satisfied Mind 1993

Like Yo La Tengo's Fakebook, the Walkabouts' Satisfied Mind is a definitive artistic statement masquerading as a loose-knit collection of acoustic covers. Sometimes a group's selection of cover material, combined with their ability to make the songs their own, winds up revealing as much about their craft as their original music, and such is the case here; mining the work of diverse artists like the Carter Family, Gene Clark, Mary Margaret O'Hara, John Cale, and Nick Cave, Satisfied Mindrepresents the purest evocation to date of the Walkabouts' aesthetic and its standing at the crossroads of country, rock, folk, and punk. By casting well-known songs in an entirely new light -- Patti Smith's "Free Money" becomes an ominous waltz, while Charlie Rich's "Feel Like Going Home" is renewed as an epic dirge -- the album makes explicit all of the implicit connections in the Walkabouts' work. By extension, it underlines the connections binding the spectrum of roots music as well; Satisfied Minddoesn't simply suggest that diverse sounds can coexist together -- it proves that they always have. AMG.

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Melanie De Biasio - A Stomach Is Burning 2012

Melanie De Biasio is a Belgian vocalist who mixes jazz, blues, and soul. Born in Charleroi, Belgium in 1978, De Biasio studied classical dance and flute before discovering her love of singing. She studied music at the Lemmens Institute in Leuven and the Brussels Conservatory. De Biasioreleased her debut album, A Stomach Is Burning, in 2007. In 2013 she returned on PIAS with No Deal, an album that reached number five on Belgium's Ultratop chart and earned her a 2015 European Border Breakers Award. The release was also strongly supported in the U.K. by BBC DJ Gilles Peterson, who had the singer perform at his 2015 Worldwide Awards ceremony. Peterson helped put together No Deal Remixed, issued on PIAS in February 2015. Contributors included Eels, Seven Davis, Jr., and Cinematic Orchestra. AMG.

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Marley's Ghost - Four Spacious Guys 1996

Marley's Ghost is an eclectic unit steeped in everything from gospel to bluegrass to old-time to Celtic to country -- even reggae. The group originally came together in 1986 whenDanny Wheetman was invited by his friend Ed Littlefield Jr.to work on a solo effort in Littlefield's studio in Arlington, WA.Jon Wilcox and Mike Phelan came up from California to help out. (The three had been playing together since St. Patrick's Day of that year.) While working on the solo effort, the three began recording the tracks for what would become theMarley's Ghost debut album Haunting Melodies. Littlefieldoffered to play steel guitar and the group was born. VocalistWheetman plays bass, rhythm guitar, fiddle, harmonica, banjo, Dobro, and lap steel. Wilcox, who holds a law degree from Stanford, sings and plays mandolin and rhythm guitar. Columbus, OH, native Phelansings and plays lead guitar, fiddle, Dobro, bass, and lap steel. Littlefield sings and plays pedal steel, Highland bagpipes, mandolin, Dobro, and lead guitar. The group released Live at the Freight, a collection commemorating their 15 years together, in January 2001 on Sage Arts Records. AMG.

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Graham Lindsey - We Are All Alone In This Together 2009

isconsin singer/songwriter Graham Lindsey debuted in 2003 with Famous Anonymous Wilderness, an album full of alt-folk-country tunes, strikingly poetic lyrics and overt Dylanisms that garnered comparisons to such similarly time-transcendent artists as Gillian Welch and Richard Buckner (thoughLindsey takes a more raw and intense approach to his idiom than those artists). Lindsey's music career actually began as a child, when he was a member of kiddie punkers Old Skull. After the dissolution of that group -- and as he hit his teen years -- Lindsey became interested in acoustic music (particularly the burgeoning anti-folk movement) and started playing local gigs in Madison, WI. After that period, he dropped music altogether for four years. His creative resurgence came during a period of self-imposed isolation in rural Nebraska; there, infused with the influence of early Dylan, Ramblin' Jack Elliot, and the '60s folk revival, he woodshedded out the tunes that would comprise his debut.Famous Anonymous Wilderness seems to at once distill ancient, knee-trembling folk and "alt" otherness, with a few tracks stepping in alt-country directions. AMG.

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Sturgill Simpson - Metamodern Sounds in Country Music 2014

Sturgill Simpson won many fans with his 2013 debut album, High Top Mountain. It is unapologetic in its evocation of '70s outlaw country. For his sophomore date, he and his band entered a Nashville studio with producer/engineer Dave Cobb (Jason Isbell), and cut Metamodern Sounds in Country Music live-to-tape in four days. These songs and their production values, though immediately reconizable, are more varied and textured than those of his debut--there's no pedal steel here for one thing. The Waylon Jennings-esque quality in Simpson's singing voice remains, but that's built in. His songwriting and confidence have grown exponentially. The set is introduced by his 82-year-old coal-mining grandfather Dood Fraley on opener and first single "Turtles All the Way Down." The track features Cobb's nylon-string guitar, the wafting tapes of a Mellotron, electric bass, acoustic and electric guitars, and sharp drums framing Simpson's lyrics that refer to Jesus, the Old Testament, Buddha, mythology, cosmology, drugs, and physics, before concluding that "love is the only thing that saved my life," making it a glorious cosmic cowboy song. On the rocking "Life of Sin," Simpson's acoustic guitar meets Laur Joamets' razor-sharp Telecaster leads in a cut-time shuffle that explodes in a country boogie. "Voices" addresses the collective and troubled history about coal-mining with wisdom--all inside a spacious yet lean three-minute country song. There are two covers here: One is a killer reading of Charlie Moore's and Bill Napier's trucker anthem "Long White Line" that careens and chugs with Joamets' razor-wire Telecaster and Simpson's flatpicking.
The other is "The Promise." Originally a hit for the British pop band When in Rome in 1989, Simpson utterly transforms it into a progressive honky tonk love song and makes it his own. "A Little Light" is rockabilly-country-gospel with wrangling guitars, handclaps, ragged-but-right vocal harmonies, and plenty of spiritual swagger. "Just Let Go" is Buddhist gospel, with gorgeous harmonies, spiralling mellotron, slide guitars, poetic lyrics, and organ--it's one of the set's finest moments. It introduces the acid-drenched psychedelic country that is "It Ain't All Flowers." Simpson's prescient, philosophical lyrics are framed inside phased, wah-wah'ed, and reverbed guitars, crunchy snares, haunting mellotron, spacy slide lines, and instrumental backmasking that wind into the stratosphere. His strident, passionate vocal is so tough, soulful and spiny, it bleeds through genre definitions as it rocks, rolls, and wails. Metamodern Sounds in Country Music is wildly adventurous; it extends the musical promise outlaw music made to listeners over 40 years ago.Simpson is too honest, restless and dedicated to country music's illustrious legacy to simply frame it as a musical museum piece. As an artist of uncommon ability, he has learned from its hallowed lineage and storied past that in order for it to evolve, it cannot be reined in; it must be free to roam in order to create its future. His visionary work on this album opens the gate wide on that frontier. AMG.

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Fat White Family - Champagne Holocaust 2013

The Fat White Family would doubtless be appalled if someone called their music folk-rock, but there is a very real "sitting around the campfire" feel to their debut album, Champagne Holocaust. In this case, the musicians are sitting around the campfire because they're too drunk, shabby, and bloody-minded to go anywhere else as they meander through their exercises in primitive blues-based noise. The image is clearest on acoustic-based numbers like "Garden of the Numb" and "Who Shot Lee Oswald?," but even when the Fat White Family strap on their electric guitars for the relatively poppy "Is It Raining in Your Mouth?" or fire up their drum machine on "Cream of the Young," this music has a raw, shambling feeling, as if several of the musicians could keel over and pass out from too much cheap gin at any given moment. Not unlike their kindred spirits the Country Teasers, the Fat White Family trade in deliberately crude music -- there are several moments here that make it clear they can play better than this, but choose not to -- and have no qualms about offending their audience, whether they're cheerfully discussing killing your kids during a visit to Disneyland or challenging your mom's sense of sexual propriety. (By comparison, their celebration of their own leather fetishism sounds more playful than they probably intended.) In short, Champagne Holocaust sounds like the work of foul-mouthed, ill-tempered drunks, but that's also clearly what they had in mind, and in its own way this album is an off-putting success -- it's hardly everyone's cup of tea, but the Fat White Family wanted nothing less. Call it satire, and don't play it around your friends who complain about those Juggalo kids who hang out by the convenience store. AMG.

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Jimmy Chamberlin Complex - Life Begins Again 2004

Though it's billed as his band first and foremost, in ways it's more accurate to call the solo debut ofJimmy Chamberlin, the brilliant jazz-into-hard rock drummer who helped make the Smashing Pumpkins deservedly famous, a collaborative effort growing out of jams with a guy named Billy. Not with Billy Corgan, though he does show up to do vocals on the gently moody "Lokicat" -- interestingly, with lyrics from Chamberlin, who wrote them throughout, aside from one song. Instead, Chamberlin's partner is one Billy Mohler, a journeyman songwriter and musician who's worked on a variety of efforts before this project. Chamberlin's sonic stamp, however, is the unsurprising core of Life Begins Again, as one listen to the rolling, rapid-fire fills on the opening "Streetcrawler" demonstrates; the similar deftness of touch mixed with power is on display throughout, showing that if anything his abilities haven't suffered even after personal and professional upheaval. This said, some songs can sound, well, a lot like the Smashing Pumpkins -- not constantly and entirely (guitarist Sean Woolstenhulmecan crank up the feedback but even the often-brawling "Cranes of Play" doesn't turn into monstrous riff mayhem), but there's the same sense of aggro and delicious melancholia on display, more than once suggesting what a version of Adore with Chamberlin on drums might have sounded like. One of the most inspired moves on the album is the use of guest vocalists as the album alternates between instrumentals and vocal numbers. Besides Mohler (on the shoegaze-tinged "Neverwaves") andCorgan's turn, there's a guest spot by Righteous Brothers legend Bill Medley on "Lullabye to Children." Perhaps most enjoyable of all, however, are the two songs sung by Catherine Wheelfrontman Rob Dickinson, whose warm, aching voice fits in perfectly on the title track and "Love Is Real." Meanwhile, among the instrumental highlights are "P.S.A.," which besides being a fine showcase forWoolstenhulme gives Chamberlin a chance to go drum crazy on the break, and the more overtly jazz jam of "Owed to Darryl." AMG.

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The Clinton Administration - One Nation Under A Re-Groove 2003

The Clinton Administration was something of an ad hoc group centered around keyboard player Robert Walter and his percussionist Chuck Prada. What a great idea: throw together a band well-versed in all things George Clinton, and work up instrumental versions of tunes from the Parliament/Funkadelic songbook. Sounds simple enough, but things got really exciting in the execution. Walter brought together both the old-school in Clyde Stubblefield (James Brown's drummer throughout the '60s, the original funky drummer) and Phil Upchurch (who played on countless blues, jazz and R&B sessions, many during the heyday of Chess Records), and the new-school with DJ Logic, Skerik and Melvin Gibbs. Of course, it's tough to go wrong with a set list like this; George Clinton can pile hooks on top of hooks on top of hooks in his tunes, but the fact is that these guys have all lived and breathed the Funk, and they just nail it as a band. Melvin Gibbs and Clyde Stubblefield would give any P-Funk rhythm section a run for their money, and Walter has all the right sounds on keys. Logic is his usual tasteful self, adding colors and details, but never overtly drawing attention. However, it's Upchurch's guitar playing that really sends things into the stratosphere. He does it all, from chicken-scratching funk to shimmering wah-wah to screaming distortion, but brings a slightly different flavor than the more rock-oriented P-Funk guitar army. A great time from start to finish, this album will get butts moving as though the Mothership itself has landed, guaranteed.

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The Questions - Belief 1984

One of these days someone anonymously dropped a comment in a post requesting some albums hard to find, here is one (more will come soon) an interesting band that mixes funk, soul, r&b and pure 80's pop. Enjoy.

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Dani Black - Dilúvio 2015

Daniel Espíndola Black, known only as Dani Black (São Paulo, 1987) is a composer, singer and Brazilian violinist. He is the son of musicians Arnold Black and Tete Espindola. Known for his work in the band 5 Seco.

After leaving the band 5 he pursued a solo career, released his first CD in 2011  under the denomination of his own name, "Dani Black".

As a composer, he has become best known for being a great partner of Maria Gadu, in which she played the "Aurora" song, Dani Black for the live DVD of the singer. In 2015 Dani composed the "Throne of study" song in support of students who have manifested against school reorganization project of the state government of Sao Paulo. The band had the participation of 18 Brazilian artists: Chico Buarque, Arnaldo Antunes (former Titans), Tiê, Dado Villa-Lobos (Keith Urban), Paulo Miklos (Titans), James Iorc, Lucas Silveira (Fresno), Filipe Catto, Zelia Duncan, Pedro Luis (Pedro Luis & The Wall), Fernando Anitelli (The Magic Theatre), André Whoong, Lucas Santtana, Miranda Kassin, Tete Espindola, Helio Flanders (Vanguart), Felipe Roseno and Xuxa Levy.

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Fernando Ortega - The Shadow Of Your Wings 2006

Classically trained as a pianist but also steeped in the Hispanic tradition of his New Mexico homeland, gospel singer/songwriter Fernando Ortega recorded more than a half-dozen LPs for various labels before signing to Myrrh/Word in 1997, as part of a Christian musical renaissance which saw a variety of musical traditions entering the liturgies of mainline churches. An aficionado of American and Irish folk as well as the Spanish-oriented music he grew up with, Ortega also studied early music and hymns as part of his education. He recorded on his own for several years before signing to Myrrh, and worked with producerJohn Andrew Schreiner for his major-label debut, 1998's This Bright Hour. Home followed two years later. AMG.

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