Now Smith is preparing to release Gold & Rust, the debut full-length of his new project Cameron Smith & The Slings which builds upon the earlier foundations, again embracing the drama and tropes of the country genre but with a newfound narrative focus. Terry Allen’s Juarez, Lee Hazlewood’s Trouble is a Lonesome Town and Willie Nelson’s Red Headed Stranger are cited as direct influences, and even some of the daring, cosmic spirit of The Dark Side of the Moon makes its way in too. A concept album centring on the classic archetype of the wanderer, following its protagonist through all his loves, losses and longings towards ultimate redemption.

Featuring guest vocals from Presley Haile, lead single ‘The Way Life Ought to Be’ not only establishes the tone of the release but serves as a microcosm of its main themes. A duet weighed down by addiction and regrets yet pressing forward all the same, loaded with the understanding that forgiveness and the hope which comes with it can only be achieved via a painful reckoning with both the past and the present.

Watch the video below, with photography, direction and video edit by Waffles and compilation and format edit by Metachronism:

Gold & Rust will be released later this year.

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Label Scissortail Records describe the album as “a nostalgic journey through the haze of youth, where time feels suspended and plans are non-existent.” The band achieve this by focussing on these small snapshots of bygone days. Seemingly mundane moments where boredom breaks its levee and becomes something of its own rush, where the dissatisfaction of cooped-up small-town living is tempered by time’s unhurried passage. Here, the future is not some dark unstoppable force rushing toward you in a clatter of hoofbeats, but something intangible, indistinct. Something to worry about tomorrow.

But its not all rose-tinted nostalgia, looking back can be painful too. Opener ‘Autumn’ is a case in point, reminiscing on provincial adolescence with an intoxicating combo of wistful longing and teeth-gritting unease. “Autumn is about the hilarious pains of growing up in a shitty small town,” Coleslaw describes. “All of the embarrassment and humiliation of being a teenager all seems so funny and sad from years away. All of it distorts as it becomes crystallized as memory.” It presents the pervading sense of no-hope aimlessness as both a freedom and a cage. Nothing matters and there’s no way out, a fact that can be both crushing and strangely liberating. “I never knew about leaving,” as Coleslaw sings, “I never knew about nothing.”

Follow up ‘Bougainvillea’ takes a similar template, a paean to responsibility-free youth that’s as warm and woozy and fragrant as the summer night on which it takes place. “’Bougainvillea’ is my favourite song on the album,” says Coleslaw. “It’s another nostalgia trip about the time in your younger years when you are free to be stupid and silly with very little consequence.” The track is delivered in a dose of swaying country, Andy “Red” PK’s pedal steel bending behind steady percussion and subtle piano. Coleslaw delivers his vocals with a forlorn faraway gaze, adding a sense of higher meaning to the tales of debauchery. “Those days of excess were wild and illuminating,” he continues, “but eventually times have to keep changing. But the view from the heights of those times never changes.”

The entire record continues in this vein, moving from good-time toe-tapping euphoria to solemn late-night longing, and spanning comforting nostalgic familiarity to a desperate desire to leave the depressing desolation of small-town existence. ‘Blue Deja Vu’ is a moody slow burn, while ‘Buffalo’ kicks up a cloud of dust in its wake as it gallops on by. Starting in a jittery shuffle that feels uncannily like waiting for the opening line’s red light to change, ‘Mr Wine’ is a song about an anxious liquor run, about finding relief at the bottom of a bottle. “Bye bye blues / hello Mr Wine,” Goddard sings in the blossoming chorus, where everything relaxes and things start to feel upbeat. But it’s hard not to see the song as a spiritual prequel to ‘AA Blues’ on previous album Tobacco City, USA, which plays like a flash-forward reminder of how this story ends. “Why can’t we just lie here? Tell it like it ain’t,” Coleslaw asks on the mid-tempo ‘Way To Get Out’, “like you are a princess and I am a saint.” It’s a rare moment in which the desperation is acknowledged directly, where tenderness tries to poke through all the hard living (“Cause all my life, I’ve been filled with doubt / And all my love is just lookin for a way to get out”)

Despite everything, it is ultimately that tenderness which shines through. Like when Goddard gets to flex her vocal skills on ‘Fruit From the Vine’, a richly romantic country swayer that’s heady with the smell of the lake and rosy-cheeked from booze or young love or both, or the three title track interludes, short ambient sketches with repeated mantra-like lyrics, that see things get a little cosmic, transcendental. But perhaps the most obvious example is on the unofficial centre point, ‘Time’, a song that captures Horses‘s spirit in just four minutes. Languid and laidback, but heartfelt too, an unhurried anthem that extols the virtues of not rushing away from that which, when you actually stop and look closely, is kinda beautiful after all.

The evening moves in gracefully
and hovers just beneath divine
Doesn’t beg that we even try not to
take our time

Horses is out now via Scissortail Records and you can order a copy from the Tobacco City Bandcamp page.

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With debut album Nayri set for release later this year, Laura Zarougian has unveiled brand new single, ‘Back To Me’. Another song which lives up to Zarougian’s own label of “one part Armenian cowgirl and one part indie rock,” this time swapping some of the stark drama for a more upbeat country rhythm. However, with this new momentum comes a strong dose of wistfulness too, as though the forward motion isn’t a carefree canter towards the future but an attempt to outpace the ever-present past. “People come back into our lives unexpectedly,” Zarougian told Americana UK, “we can look to the past, try to piece it together—but like many things, sense can’t always be made of paper puzzles.”

Nayri will be released on the 15th September.

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The track has now been released alongside a second single, ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’. A song which furthers this search for honesty and authenticity through the prism of slow-burning country rock. The result is something between a confession and a promise, unfurling with an assured quality as Lauren O’Connell paints an emotional state both fierce and tender. “I wanna know the threads you weave / Spun silk of the lives that you lead,” as they sing with quiet passion, “Whatever you want me to see / Is in these hands / All at your command.”

I wanna break the dam
Overplay my hand
Baby if I can
I wanna be your man

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Described as an “experiment in limitations and creative self-control,” Shasta was recorded around a wood stove in a hillside studio in Big Sur, using solar energy to power a Tascam 388, with Thomas refusing to go beyond the eight available tracks. The process goes some way to explaining the record’s intimate tones, though instrumental opener ‘Ascension’ dispels any notion the self-imposed constraints might impact the sound’s richness. The opposite turns out to be true, as though in turning to simplicity Levi Thomas taps into some organic energy, an amalgamation of heat and shadow as drawn from sunlight, wood smoke, the rising warmth of the Californian night.

‘Sun God’ invokes these forces directly, a prayer to “rain and rock and sea,” to “feather, fur and gnashing teeth,” before ‘Wrecked’ offers the full vivid texture of cosmic country. The album sees Dominic Aiello (drums), Darwin Siegaldoud (bass, prepared organ, wurlitzer),  C.H. McCoy (piano, organ, wurlitzer), Nicholas Merz (pedal steel, backup vocals) and Kit Center (drum machine, percussion, backup vocals) lend their talents, and its the slow tracks like ‘Wrecked’ where this depth is most apparent. Thomas’s vocals drifting above the aching music like some spirit ascending above his body and looking down upon the sad view.

Elsewhere the sound changes energy, from the upbeat rhythm of ‘Concrete Buddha’ and its desperate memories to the taut simmer of ‘Trinity’ and its foreboding nighttime edge. ‘Dog Star’ draws upon elements of prog and psych rock in its slow build, playing out as something between Pink Floyd and Magnolia Electric Co., complete with Molina-esque lyrics of ritual release.

So take me back to Shady Grove
Sing me something sweet and slow
Cover me in Dogwood flowers and float me down the Finley
As above we‘ll be so low
Fire light descending

The track embodies the subtle change across the record, an instance where Levi Thomas starts to feel the reward for his prior rituals and embrace the situation’s sacred weight. A narrative thread which culminates in the closing title track. “A song seized by the sublime scale of the American West,” was how we described it in a preview. A “revelatory experience […] captured with a decidedly seventies style, equal parts classic country and cosmic psych which invites the listener into the moment, never losing control of its relaxed rhythms despite everything.” For though the doom-laden tone is never quite transcended, the conclusion finds Thomas in a more peaceful state, as though having come to relax into the end which is descending.

My mind left my body north on the five
And I feel like the last man alive

We could make the perfect sound
Fall like fire to the ground

Shasta is out now via The Long Road Society and available from the Levi Thomas Bandcamp page.

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This sense of reflection is inherent across the album, as is the manner in which it shapes ideas of the future too. As though everything exists as both an opening and aftermath, and every end carries the implicit possibility of undoing itself. Be it in morose build of ‘How Silly’ or warm promise of ‘Satellites’, or indeed the vulnerability of ‘Happy’. The sense of constantly working through something which has happened while never losing hope some new dawn is about to break.

“A slow-burning meditation on leaving a place you have come to love which finds itself caught between melancholic reminiscence, a fear of the unknown and the persistent hope latent within every instance of change,” as we wrote of ‘Little Apartment’ in a preview, which incidentally turns out as a pretty apt description of Gas Station Blue as a whole. “But what really stands out,” we continued, “is Spencer Thomas Smith’s patience amid such a swirl of emotions. A sense of compassion and fondness which outlives any present uncertainty.”

And all I can ever give you
is something you can only see inside
so take your time, the water’s fine
shake the blues off one by one
I’ll be here when you wake up

Gas Station Blue is out now and available from the usual places.

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Out this autumn, forthcoming release The Electric River sees Matthew Squires continue his journey into America’s strange heart, again joined by trusty backing band the Learning Disorders. With Gianni Sarmiento (lead guitar, backup vocals), James Lavery (lead guitar), Savanah Shanks (synth, backup vocals), Zane Frisch (bass guitar) and Ray Flynt (drums, backup vocals), the release sees a pivot toward a starker, country-psych sound. One attuned not only to the revelationary terror of our current situation but also the search for meaning and goodness within such a world.

There could be no better introduction to the release than lead single ‘The Ballad of Norm MacDonald’. A classic highway visitation song updated for late capitalism—an age of precarious labour, commodification and ubiquitous entertainment. Like Steve Earle’s ‘The Tennessee Kid’ if it wasn’t Satan who visited the narrator but some kind of modern-day saint. Norm MacDonald to be exact. Fittingly written after a long shift at Whole Foods.

“I had been chewing on the almost Andy Kaufmanesque way he died and listened to some very enigmatic interviews he had given about life and death, where he seemed to me to have a strong Kierkegaardian streak,” Matthew Squires explains. “When I wrote the song, in a way I was trying to pay homage to the spirit of his idiosyncratic brand of humour, what with my sort of ironic playing around with the trope of the balladeer who talk-sings at the beginning of a song about walking down a highway.” Just as MacDonald repurposed old tropes with a balance of irony and earnestness, so to does Squires this country archetype. A religious experience both terrifying and thrilling and utterly bizarre.

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March sees the release of Can’t Get Right With the Darkness, the second Clementine Was Right record. It promises to build upon the foundations of Lightning & Regret while pushing deeper into the wounds and wonders it discovers along the way. With a balance of indie rock and country sensibilities, the songs are at once more rugged and joyous than the previous album, leaving no emotion untapped as they aim to paint the most vivid version of each story possible. “A second record is for dancing even deeper and the different towns you do it in,” Young puts it, “the strangers you made along the way and the candles you don’t know how to hold.”

Latest single ‘Dreaming of Dancing in a Different Town’ takes this sentiment to heart, and serves as the perfect introduction to the Clementine Was Right sound. If the wistful tone is decidedly nostalgic, it is not the hazy nostalgia so often peddled. Rather these are memories with their teeth left intact, as vivid and painful as the moment they occurred. Fitting for a song, in Young’s words, about “the ache of naïve promises.” As he continues:

You start out flirting and trading clove cigarettes outside the laser tag place, and you end up running into someone years later and admitting you never understood why they were crying. You wanted to. You had a lot of plans. You jumped into the river at dawn. You haven’t forgotten any of them.

Can’t Get Right With the Darkness is out in March and you can pre-order it now from the Clementine Was Right website.

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Following on from EP Body Child Light Crime, released last year on Sleepy Cat Records, Owen Matthew FitzGerald is again working with the label to release a brand new full-length, A deep clean you can count on! The record takes on a whole host of topics, ruminating on love, addiction and loss, not to mention the curious sensation of having a body and being alive even when you might not feel quite so animated. “These nine songs are like school pictures,” FitzGerald explains. “They are wallet-sized portraits taken between 2006 and 2016. The songs on A deep clean you can count on! are frightened, sad, confused, bewildered, dislocated, hopeful, and hopeless. They’re emotional snapshots.”

Despite this apparent emotional distance, the songs retain the visceral mood and idiosyncratic details of the present moment. Something FitzGerald discovered all too readily, pulled towards the past through a renewed engagement with it. But the songs’ lesson is not to bury oneself in memories, or hope to escape them entirely. Rather to work through the present with their weight keeping your feet on the ground. “Sometimes I can’t recognize myself in the songs. Other times I’m so swept up that I’m carried back in time by strong, old feelings,” he explains. “I’m hungover and doomed. I’m an unfixable thing that hurts other people. Whenever you find an old picture of yourself in a yearbook or a sock drawer I hope you feel happy to be where you are. More than anything else, that’s how this record makes me feel.”

The album’s first single, ‘Touching the Oven at Work’ is the perfect introduction to this style. A picture of a time where every sign of life was incidental, every possible edge dulled. FitzGerald delivers this in his distinctively earnest style, his vocals plainspoken and often hushed, the edges of his desperation curling with a dark humour as he searches for proof his life is continuing despite mounting evidence to the contrary.

If my heart pumps blood through my veins…
If my eyes turn light into sight…
If it still hurts, touching the oven at work…
Why do I feel dead?

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Next year sees Sara Rachele return with Heartstrings, a brand new album released via Ropeadope Records. Recorded with between London, Brooklyn and Rachele’s hometown of Little 5 Points in Atlanta, Georgia, and with a wide array of collaborators and friends, the album’s diversity is apparent in its very essence. With elements of pop, folk, Americana and jazz all comingling, the songs are tied together by a sixties retro-polish, casting Rachele as the archetypal troubadour—a figure always moving, always searching, never content in one place for too long.

Single ‘Go South’ encapsulates this aesthetic. A rich country rock jam carved from the Americana tradition, equal parts smouldering emotion and heart-on-the-sleeve vulnerability. Though it is far more polished than anything on Scorpio Sun, the mood is as stark as ever, Rachele’s croon emerging through the brooding bluesy style with a hard won wisdom.

Get wise or go south
New York will spit you out
Get tough or just get out
Get wise
Get wise or go

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