In the age of skimming albums, you might be quick to judge the full-length Poems, Prayers, Stories, Songs, and Sayings from Ry Jennings as a Country album. There’s certainly a twang to his voice, as well as plenty of gently rolling acoustic guitars and lyrical tales of God and the Devil. However, if you allow yourself to pause and enjoy a few minor details, you’ll notice that there’s a whole lot more to this release than such an over simplification.

“Robot Cowboy” exemplifies this attention to detail as it manages to combine a space-age lead and narrative about an actual robot with a horse clomping percussion that couldn’t sound more like the Old West if it wanted to. This genuinely surprising combination of instrumentation happens consistently throughout the record. “Thank You (Jeff and Jeffrey)” hops along with a jaunty percussion and a swirling flute, “When I Die” delivers mandolin and a deathwish to go to hell and “Heavenly Father“, though instrumental, still manages to combine a western whistle with shockingly unnerving field recordings.

The more time you invest in Poems, Prayers, Stories, Songs, and Sayings the more you realize what a delightful potpourri of styles you’re dealing with. It sincerely embraces the basics of Folk and Country but expertly turns them on their head by integrating just about sound Jennings feels will tell his story best. If “Robot Cowboy” doesn’t hit your Best Of lists, it’s a sin.

Stumbling upon this EP from Slush the day after seeing Tame Impala play could not have been more impeccable timing. While the two are certainly unique and enjoyable in their own right, they both scratch a similar itch.

There are elements of shoegaze and psych abound in this 21-minute debut that strike a great balance between the energetic and catchy (“The Less You Do The More You Win“), the quietly subdued (“Precoitus“) and a floaty immersion (“Seriously“). It’s easy to imagine a backdrop of swirling visuals to accompany any piece of this.

The comparison to Tame Impala is a lazy reference but there’s clearly a similar approach to taking from several niche genres and combining them into a new, streamlined, version of itself. Slush is on to something and this EP should go into your rotation stat.

When I encountered the latest release from Crave On over on The Cream I was perplexed. Who was this band and how did they have such a deep discography, yet I’d never heard of them? Sure, there’s tons of bands in town that I am entirely ignorant to but there’s something about these songs in particular that felt like it came from a different era of Nashville. That immediate familiarity mixed with being completely foreign fueled my interest.

Now having listened to Ace on the Outspeaker a dozen times, I’m a few baby steps closer to comprehending exactly what it is about this record that is so grabbing. Crave On has managed to put together a record filled with bizarre combinations. The production values are crisp and polished but the combination of instrumentation choices is atypical at best; violin and mandolin meet drum machine microbeats. Lyrical storytelling that is captivating and catchy but eschews pandering refrains. An energy to the record that is languid but entirely coy – with singer Patrick Orr casting a spell through each of the twelve tales being told. I’m wary of using such esoteric language to describe how an album sounds but there’s an element of mystique to the entire undertaking that’s hard to deny.

In talking with the band about their history and how they came to make this album, Orr informed me:

Kate (Richi) and I had just been on vacation to Berlin and I was kind of inspired by all the electronic music there so I got a cheap drum machine and we started messing with that. It felt stupid to try to play our old songs with a drum machine instead of a drummer so we hatched a plan to record a new batch of stuff that all came from Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music. I grew up hearing that music because my dad is a kind of folklorist/music encyclopedia who used to be a music writer for the Nashville Banner/Tennessean and has worked at the Country Music Hall of Fame since 2001.

After that project we took a year and a half to figure out how we could present a new batch of songs without a drummer in an interesting way. We ended up leaning into the Can/Neu!/Kraftwerk thing with the drum machine which at this point is 3 different machines that are on a pedal board which I put on a keyboard stand…

With just this morsel of historical context, Ace on the Outspeaker becomes infinitely more comprehensible. It’s the logical (but surprising) creation of a tight knit trio of musicians that have steeped themselves equally in American Folk music and Krautrock. The lyrical style is a direct connection to the storytelling tales of the aforementioned Anthology and the mesmerizing build of each song owes itself to krautrock fundamentals. You could have never predicted someone could pull it off but Crave On was daring enough to try and skilled enough to make it work. Extremely well.

Electronic musician Eve Maret recently re-issued her 2018 debut album, No More Running, as a Deluxe Edition version; which includes three new tracks from the original.

We were already huge fans of the first issue release. There’s a vintage feel to the whole endeavor that’s filled with spacey sounds, hypnotic beats, a meditative pace and vocoded vocals that, surprisingly, give it a human element. The three new tracks continue that thread but with subtle hints of growth and things to come. They don’t stand out explicitly as new tracks but lightness of “Pink Ray”, the swirling keyboards of “My Own Pace” and heartbreaking execution of “Memoriam” are different than the somewhat darker tone of the rest of the record. Whereas the album previously ended with “Many Moons”, a somewhat noir and melancholy affair, we now have a new final act that could be heard with a more optimistic tone.

Maybe that’s reading too much into it? Maybe these tracks were b-sides all along and only saw the light of day because of the success of No More Running but I don’t believe that’s the case. These additions serve to tell the whole story of Maret’s debut into the world and it really is deluxe.