Country Lines

After releasing a rather impressive (if not plentiful) double-disc Anthology session a year prior, Shout Factory! followed up in 2006 with Where a Country Boy Belongs. Like Anthology, it's a two-disc, 32-song affair spanning the group's entire career, including two brand new compositions, which is worth the purchase price alone for dedicated, die-hard fans…

“There would be no Black Keys without this music,” said Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys. `Hill Country Blues’represents the concentric circle where we crossed over musically as teenagers. To celebrate this music, the Black Keys have launched a new playlist titled Hill Country Blues.” It dives deeply into the history and heritage of the genre, an unusual regional style of the Blues specific to Northern Mississippi that inspired the The Black Keys’ new covers album, Delta Kream (out May 14 on Nonesuch). The Black Keys hand-selected a variety of songs for the list, ranging from RL Burnside to Junior Kimbrough to Jessie Mae Hemphill. The playlist includes artists both renowned and obscure, honoring the hill country blues traditions that inspired the Black Keys’s inception.

The Fish's second album is quite similar to their first in its organ-heavy psychedelia with Eastern-influenced melodic lines, but markedly inferior to the debut, and much more of a period piece. There's more spaciness and less cosmic energy here, and while the band members were undoubtedly serious in their explorations, some of these songs are simply silly in their cosmic naïveté. To be crueler, there is no other album that exemplifies so strongly the kind of San Francisco psychedelia that Frank Zappa skewered on his classic We're Only in It for the Money. The weeping, minor-key melodies, liquid guitar lines, and earnestly self-absorbed quests to explore the inner psyche – …

Lambchop seem like one the most domesticated bands around. Maybe it’s because their sound, despite the fullness that comes from so many members, retains its subtlety and subdued complexity with the loose feel of a pick-up band among friends. Or maybe it’s because in songs such as “Nashville Parent” and “The New Cobweb Summer,” singer / lyricist Kurt Wagner always seems to be wandering his house, thinking deep thoughts about dogs and sponges, and doling wryly homespun wisdom like some brilliantly addled Lewis Grizzard. He finds inspiration in such housebound activities as walking the dog, verbally sparring with the missus, and drinking in the backyard. In a sense, this is the flipside of the typical country concerns of cheating spouses and barstool life, playing up not the heartache that haunts most songs, but the mundanity of the day-to-day grind that everyone faces—as well as the small particulars that make it worthwhile.