The talented young singer-songwriter has as much in common with John Prine as she does with Kenny Chesney. With any luck, Same Trailer, Different Park is the start of a long career that will make both Musgraves' core audience and other open-minded listeners sit up and take notice.
On his new album, The 3dom Factor, Altschul is great at mixing opposites: abstract melodic concepts with parade beats, open improvising and percolating swing. The album is the sort of comeback that reminds you how much good music the artist made the first time around.
R&B singers Nicole Wray and Terri Walker both had promising starts to their careers more than a decade ago, but neither became a household name. Now they've teamed up and traded in slick, hip-hop influenced styles for a decidedly throwback feel.
Before he became the guitarist for ZZ Top, Billy Gibbons was in a band called the Moving Sidewalks that just missed its shot at stardom. The album the Moving Sidewalks never released in the late 1960s was released in late 2012 and is very much a period piece, albeit a very well-made one.
The twin sisters from Canada depart from their indie singer-songwriter roots with their latest album. The music on Heartthrob is often loaded with a carefully articulated sense of doubt that Tegan and Sara suggest needs to be shaken off through a triumph of the pop-music will.
The icon's new album plays like a collection of discreet singles, with each performed in a different style, genre and mood. In this way, the album isn't a return to form, in part because David Bowie never took one form to begin with.
Recruiting the likes of Guy Clark and Vince Gill, the country singer and member of The Pistol Annies works within a tradition that extends back well beyond her twentysomething years. Monroe avoids the pitfalls of cliche, with sentiments on her new album that are nothing if not nicely ambivalent.