eilen jewell

This EP arrived from the winnner of last year's Gold Guitar award at the annual Gore country music festival and she has already taken herself to Tamworth in Australia to further her career. And you'd expect she will go far. Here with a small and seasoned band -- and covering Tami Neilson's Cigarette -- she moves easily between slightly...
> music/3018/helen-van-der-linden-helen-van-der-linden-ep-hvdl/

Singer-songwriter Bristow moved from New Zealand to Austin in 2008 (where this, her third album, was recorded) and it would be easy and convenient to drop her into the alt.country/country category. Certainly on the recent tour with Tami Neilson and Lauren Thomson she fitted into that zone. Those three gals delivered a terrific show which...
> music/2906/jackie-bristow-freedom-ode/

The previous album by this Atlanta-based singer-songwriter, Lantana of last year, was a revelation: her crystalline vocals conjured up the purity of Joan Baez but her sometimes dark subject matter took her into that emotionally unsettling area where the likes of Gillian Welch, Lucinda Williams and Eilen Jewell sometimes set up shop. The...
> music/2693/caroline-herring-golden-apples-of-the-sun-ode/

It's a curious thing that in New Zealand where country and alt.country of various persuasions has become increasingly popular that an album like this slips past most people. It slipped past me until very recently, although I'm pleased to note her previous one Red Dirt Angel, didn't go around the judges at the 2009 music awards who picked it as...
> music/2657/tami-neilson-the-kitchen-table-sessions-vol-1-ode/

Chambers -- daughter of the very great singer-songwriter Bill -- is one of Australia's finest alt.country/roots artists and here she teams up with her husband Nicholson for their first album together. Oddly enough although they play together in their casual side-project The Lost Dogs covers band they hadn't previously written together --...
> music/1617/best-of-elsewhere-2008-kasey-chambers-and-shane-nicholson-rattlin-bones-liberation/

Given the tone of some of the 11 songs here -- political disillution, desperate love, a song called The Party's Over and one about the inevitability of the Great Correction -- you'd have to assume the album title is slightly ironic.Yet this Austin-based singer-songwriter never dips into the dark without leaving room for light, and even the...
> music/1711/eliza-gilkyson-beautiful-world-red-house-elite/

The other night we were flicking across the music channels and did that rare thing, paused for more than five seconds because there was a remarkable voice about which I said, "Wow, I'd like to hear more from that one". "That one" -- as it turned out two days later when a copy of this EP was pressed into my hand -- was...
> music/1630/gin-extended-play-island-universal/

To my embarrassment I admit to never having heard of this alt.country singer-songwriter, now onto (I think) her third album. Apparently she won the best new artist award at Austin's South X Southwest Festival in 2002 and I imagine she has picked a few awards and many fans since. She's won me with this one, her pure Baez-like vocals, the...
> music/1563/caroline-herring-lantana-signature/

This singer-songwriter from Idaho (originally, then LA and latterly Massachusetts) will be deluding herself if she thinks that no one will say "early Lucinda Williams" when they hear the track In the End here: the same world-weary, vowel dragging delivery . . . But Jewell has much more going for her than that comparison: with a...
> music/1511/eilen-jewell-letters-from-sinners-and-strangers-signature/

About 10 or so years ago I spent a few days in Turangi on the southern shore of Lake Taupo in New Zealand's North Island. I was on an assignment for the Herald. I wish I could say the story involved fishing in a town that boldly asserts it is the Trout Fishing Capital of the World but, in deference to people are dedicated to that sport, I admit...
> travelstories/301/tokaanu-new-zealand-2007-small-towns-on-a-slow-up-spin/

I just caught a glance at him out of the corner of my eye when I heard him shout “Why don’t you keep quiet”. Or words to that effect, with unprintable expletives included. He was dressed in a lawyer’s suit, had close-cropped hair, had those mad staring eyes like Chris Dixon, and was wound tight as a drum. His fist...
> somethingelsewhere/378/auckland-city-where-the-past-is-present/

Good historic hotels are getting harder to find. Increasingly the elderly pubs of the nation are being gentrified and scrubbed clean. Their walls are being painted up nice, a colour consultant is hired, and the big boys move in and take what was once the character of the place and reshape it into something more . . . marketable? The history...
> travelstories/294/ross-south-island-of-new-zealand-home-is-where-the-hearth-is/

In the city of Los Angeles -- which is 19th-century Spanish for "the land where men walk on four wheels" -- it sometimes seems that only the socially disenfranchised take the bus. That's not entirely true, of course. Every day any number of good honest folk ride the MTA -- but so, too, do veterans of the alcohol wars, strange men...
> travelstories/272/la-by-bus-carless-in-car-town/

The handbrake might give you a bit of trouble, says John as he finishes a litany of idiosyncrasies about his beautifully restored 1957 Mark Two Zephyr. I have already heard it can pop out of second, to put in a measure of Valvoline with the petrol, to check the water daily, and that riding the brakes downhill might lead to them overheating and...
> travelstories/257/east-coast-north-island-of-new-zealand-hawkes-bay-the-long-way/