The Milk Carton Kids

The Milk Carton Kids make folk music. While you might add “pure and simple” to that phrase, it wouldn’t tell you the full story of the L.A.-based duo – Kenneth Pattengale and Joey Ryan – who combine traditional guitar-and-voice simplicity with comic onstage patter that has earned comparisons to the Smothers Brothers. On the  pair’s third full-length release, The Ash & Clay, and first for respected indie label Anti-, the sound is as sweet as ever, full of graceful picking and high harmonies that recall early Simon and Garfunkel classics, with a touch of that country soul associated with the likes of Gillian Welch and David Rawlings.   Read more...

Nkulee Dube

It’s Thursday night in downtown Johannesburg and some 500 people are packed into Bassline, a warehouse-like club in a hipster-friendly neighborhood. They’re here for South Africa’s longest-running sound system, or crew of reggae DJs. But tonight they get something extra: a young woman sporting dreadlocks and an army cap gets on the mic to freestyle.

Her name is Nkulee Dube, and she carries two storied legacies on her shoulders. She’s now the country’s biggest reggae star — and the daughter of the man sometimes dubbed “Africa’s Peter Tosh.”

“When I travel around the world, people are like, ‘We are just happy there is someone taking over, putting on your dad’s shoes,’ ” Dube says. “I’m like, ‘What? I cannot put on those shoes. They’re very heavy!’ ”   Read more...

Jace Clayton

The experimental music hotbed that was New York in the 1960s and ’70s is a tough one to rival. Think of all the famous names: Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Albert Ayler, Patti Smith. A name you probably haven’t heard? Singer, writer, dancer and minimalist composer Julius Eastman.

“When I first heard his music, I was actually floored,” musician Jace Clayton says. “It was beautiful, it was muscular and hypnotic. [I thought,] ‘Wow, this was being made back then — what other things have I missed?’ ”

But even for classical music devotees, Eastman was easy to miss — never as famous as the likes of Reich and Glass. As for reasons why, there are a lot of good guesses. He was black. He was gay. And the titles of his pieces were often provocative — darkly funny on one hand, Clayton says, but also deeply angry.   Read more...

JD McPherson

Named as an “artist you should know” in 2011 by NPR, singer-songwriter JD McPherson will make his Rounder Records debut April 17 with the release of Signs and Signifiers, “a rockin’, bluesy, forward-thinking album that subtly breaks the conventions of most vintage rock projects.” (All Music). Known for energetic live shows, JD and the band will hit the road in support of the release this spring with stops in Austin (SXSW), New York, Boston, Chicago, and other cities.   Read more...

Graham Parker and the Rumour

Graham Parker has reunited his original band the Rumour for their first album together in 31 years,Three Chords Good, out November 19 via Primary Wave Records. Produced by Dave Cook and Graham Parker, the collection’s twelve original tracks of driving and confessional rock and roll were recorded in upstate New York and feature the classic Rumour line-up of Brinsley Schwarz and Martin Belmont on guitars, Steve Goulding on drums, Andrew Bodnar on bass and Bob Andrews on keyboards. “After a hiatus of over 30 years, it was extraordinary to hear the Rumour backing my material again,” says Parker. “We’ve finally made an album of true musical collaboration that we’re all very proud of.”   Read more...

Kid Rock

On election night,, Kid Rock did something unusual, even for him. The Southern rock-rapper, a famed party monster whose annual Chillin’ the Most cruise concert is an Olympian feat of seaborne drinking, conked out early.

Kid Rock, born Robert Ritchie, had performed at rallies for Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, and his anthem for individual liberty, “Born Free,” became the campaign’s theme song. Perhaps the 41-year-old hoped to sleep through any bad news on the most nerve-wracking night in American politics. Or maybe this onetime Jim Beam spokesman had turned over another new leaf and was following the straight-laced example of his candidate.   Read more...

The Rolling Stones

Available in various different formats – including a three-CD 50 track version featuring 50 tracks, and a four-CDSuper-Deluxe version gathering a whopping 80 tracks – the collection tells the fascinating ongoing story of the Greatest Rock’n'Roll Band In The World, from their high octane version of Chuck Berry’s Come On, their first single issued in June 1963, via the thrilling chart-toppers The Last Time, (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction, Get Off Of My Cloud, Jumping Jack Flash and Honky Tonk Women and the perennial juke-box and concert favoritesBrown Sugar, Tumbling Dice, Miss You and Start Me Up, all the way to the present day with the inclusion ofGloom And Doom and One Last Shot, two new studio recordings recently completed by the group in Paris, France.   Read more...

The Explorers Club

Beachwood Sparks

It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that every piece of music needs to be important; that it must impart something meaningful, reinvent, redefine or otherwise aspire to greatness. Next to the groundbreaking, the merely happy-making can seem too minor to merit discussion, let alone celebration. But the ability to convey the soothing breeziness of a warm summer evening is no trifling matter for those craving comfort and escape.

The charming L.A. band Beachwood Sparks recently reassembled after a lengthy hiatus, yet its first full-length album since 2001 still meets at that misty midpoint between ’70s singer-songwriter pop and harmony-intensive Americana, with a light dusting of psychedelia to enhance the dreamlike effect. When it’s not drifting into excessive smoothness (“Leave That Light On”) or lighthearted goofery (“No Queremos Oro”), The Tarnished Gold shimmers with rare but seemingly effortless prettiness.

“Forget the Song,” “Water From the Well” and the swoony “Nature’s Light” are all winsomely marvelous, but The Tarnished Gold, out June 26, mostly commits itself to establishing a mood rather than dispensing big moments. The result won’t likely land on many best-of-the-year lists, but for the most part, those run in snowy gray Decembers anyway. The Tarnished Gold is an album for right now — a subtle but crucial ingredient to enhance and accompany your June sunsets, July drives and August barbecues.

Glen Hansard

Glen Hansard dropped out of school nearly three decades ago to busk on the streets of Dublin, and he’s long since learned how to fill the open air with his voice. He can boom stridently with the brashest belters, while the signature hole in his acoustic guitar — the product of countless pummeling strums — embodies the wear-and-tear of a life lived with outsize emotions. As lead singer of The Frames, Hansard often muses over intense desires and the pursuit of redemption (“I want my life to make more sense,” he sang in 1999′s “Pavement Tune”), and that’s frequently meant bellowing with messianic ferocity.   Read more...