The Main Street Gospel
Love Will Have Her Revenge
Tee Pee

Blowin’ in on the winds of yesteryear is The Main Street Gospel, a country-psych band with ties to Brian Jonestown Massacre and a sound so steeped in nostalgia and tradition you gotta blow the dust off of it just to discover the true treasure it really is. Love Will Have Her Revenge, the Ohio trio’s debut, is a laid back approach to the usual foot-stomp of mustache rock, and gets its point across by way of delicate pop melodies, tin cup blues, and breezy jams. While none of the songs here are exceptionally overpowering in their virility, they do have amazing breadth, depth, and reach, like the thick roots of an old and impressive tree. Not only that, but they shake and hum at times with a journeyman vibe, as the longest songs on deck (“Fool’s Gold,” “Ready to Shine,” and “She’s a Disease”) draw you into a solitary world of lonely rural squatting and the hallucinations it might induce with their 70s-inspired freak-folk rock. You’ll be able to hear a wide array of influences on this one, like Neil Young, Wilco, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Dead Meadow, and Blood Meridian, but in the end it’s just good ol’ rock n’ roll — vulnerable, honest, heartfelt, and a tad trippy.

Check out  MSG performing the title track from Love Will Have Her Revenge!

Souvenir’s Young America
The Name of the Snake
Init Records

Souvenir’s Young America hollow out a small part of your mind in order to separate themselves from the dense din of all the instrumental post-rock and experimental metal out there, and in that crater they lay something so remarkably vast, so terribly scary, that a mere whisper of its presence alerts you to your certain doom. Not that the Virginia band’s latest album, The Name of the Snake, is abundantly evil, it’s just that it exudes a numbing solitude that borders on hallucination desolation. The four songs laid down here (you get three bonus tracks from their September Songs EP as well if you happen to have the CD) moan like a five-hundred-year-old desert wind, beat on the old, dry, cracked earth like a chain-gang of ghosts, and lead you on a callous, lonely walk through the valley of the shadow of death. The star of this album, however, is the harp. The heavy momentum on “Water (Forgetting the Past),” “Vanishing (Remaining),” and “Amnesia (A Victor’s History)” isn’t disrupted by the haunting harmonica that calls you home with a totem’s tongue; instead they work together in some kind of brazen, taunting harmony. The backwoods brass and cowboy harmonica of “Dust (Erasing the Future),” the album’s commandeering ballad, is for outlaws only, and captures the spirit of wide open, starry nights and circling, hungry vultures. Again, the dichotomy of hope and desperation abounds. You don’t get the same old epic, aural sound scape with SYA that you do with other bands of their ilk. What you get instead is the distinct, suffocating, and palpable feeling that the end is near. Deep, awesome stuff.

Listen to “Vanishing (Remaining)” from The Name of the Snake!

Jay Bennett
Kicking at the Perfumed Air
The Jay Bennett Foundation

This posthumous release of Jay Bennett’s final album, Kicking at the Perfumed Air, comes to us courtesy of his family and friends, who brought Bennett’s production notes together to complete the project, and the good people at The Jay Bennett Foundation, who have released it as a free download (donations graciously accepted). Bennett, best known for his work with Wilco, has released a number of solo albums since his departure from his former band, and while most of them contain dark, haunting indie-blues songs spurred on my Bennett’s inner demons, Kicking at the Perfumed Air captures the songwriter in a lighter mood, incorporating a richer, multi-instrumental sound. I’d never describe Bennett’s songwriting as grandiose because it’s smothered in too much desperation and soul for that kind of label, but he comes close to reaching that watermark on a few songs here, including “Second Last Call,” “Hotel Song,” and “Invitation,” which boast an up-beat country flavour. Others, like “Footprints” and “When Heaven Held the World” draw you back into Jay’s lonely, broken universe like a midnight stroll through a dusty ghost town. Finally, I couldn’t think of a better way to end Bennett’s final album than with “Beer,” the quintessential ballad — funny, sad, poignant, and starkly beautiful. Bennett’s songwriting brilliance was remarkable and unmistakable, and now, like Elliott Smith and Cranford Nix before him, he’s gone. But, hopefully, not forgotten.

Listen to “Beer” from Kicking at the Perfumed Air!

Download Kicking at the Perfumed Air here!