David Quinn "Country Fresh"
David Quinn’s third album was born from a logo on a decades-old ashtray he found in a corner nook at Nashville’s Sound Emporium while tracking his previous record. The amber glass piece had seen better days, but it was the words “Country Fresh” imprinted on the side in its vintage font that grabbed Quinn’s attention. “I never stopped thinking about it and started using the phrase ‘country fresh’ to describe how I was living and all the things that I like. It just stuck with me and once I wrote the song ‘Country Fresh’ it ended up being the whole theme of the record.”
Armed with a dozen new songs after soaking up his new life in the woods, Quinn decided that for this album he’d up the ante and produce it himself. Returning to Sound Emporium with handpicked players, including Laur Joamets (Drivin N Cryin) on slide guitar and solos, Micah Hulscher (Emmylou Harris) on piano, Fats Kaplin (John Prine) on fiddle, dobro, banjo and harmonica, Miles Miller (Sturgill Simpson) on drums, Jamie T. Davis (Margo Price) on guitar and Brett Resnick (Kacey Musgraves) on pedal steel, the album was engineered and mixed by Mike Stankiewicz (Willie Nelson, Shooter Jennings, Jason Isbell) and mastered by John Baldwin Mastering (The Rolling Stones, Merle Haggard, Kris Kristopherson).
Alongside this star-studded ensemble, Quinn recorded a love letter to the midwest with tunes that tell stories of lost love, the open road, and finding one’s place in the world. Country Fresh is a collection of country-fried Americana gems corralled by Quinn’s singular voice and expertly-spun tales of heartache and triumphs amidst a vast midwestern landscape.
New Norde "Whatever’s Clever"
The members of New Norde used to make relatively shiny pop songs as 2000s New Hampshire seacoast stalwarts, The Minus Scale. This new project is a power-pop trio who shamelessly wear influences like Matthew Sweet, Nada Surf, Teenage Fanclub, and Guided by Voices on its collective sleeve.
Forming in the fall of 2019, the band spent 18 months remotely wood-shedding dozens of songs. On April 15th, 2022, New Norde will release their debut EP, Whatever’s Clever (Trash Casual / Mint 400); a selection of carefully crafted power-pop songs about growing up, getting out, taking a damn minute, and cake.
Tim Kasher "Middling Age"
Middling Age is the new album from indie rocker Tim Kasher, also known as the front man for Cursive and the Good Life. On his anticipated follow up to No Resolution, Kasher dives head on into the painful realities and struggles of navigating life as the years climb. Featured artists on the album include; Laure Jane Grace (Against Me!), Jeff Rosenstock, Jayson Gerycz (Cloud Nothings) and Macy Taylor (Bright Eyes, The Mystic Valley Band).
Jesse Mac Cormack "SOLO"
In the deepest depths of the Pandemic, with a relationship in its ending, Jesse Mac Cormack recalls sending a text to his therapist: “I’m not meeting with you every week just to hang out,” the bilingual musician wrote. “Je veux que ça saigne”—for the work to “bleed.” To mean something. The next time they met, his therapist explained: “That message you sent me? You were really sending it to yourself. You were taking a decision.”
That decision—to move forward, to change and have the courage to love yourself—is the journey of the past two years and also of SOLO, which gleams and shivers and pulses with the heartbeat of an artist in beautiful evolution. A softer album than his debut LP Now (2019), it is nonetheless riven by the fear and flood of disappointment that marked these recent years—and the singer’s childhood.
As on Now, Mac Cormack plays almost every instrument himself, surrounded by a soundtrack of one. Across 10 rippling tracks, the singer summons a sonic world that’s razor-edged and intimate, influenced by the textured electronics of James Blake, Little Dragon, Caribou and SUUNS. Drum machines stutter under blooms of synths; curses float below swirls of loving sound.