Tres Pescadores
Rick Shea ranks alongside Dave Alvin and the late Chris Gaffney in the Southern California roots-rock movement, which morphed out of the Los Angeles country-rock movement in the 1980s by taking on a Southwestern folk edge. Over the years, in fact, the three have played on each other’s albums and toured together intermittently as Dave Alvin and the Guilty Men.
MPI
Buddy Emmons backed up singers and recorded his own instrumental pedal steel guitar albums, so it’s logical for this excellent tribute — funded via Kickstarter and the production school Music Producers Institute — to contain nine vocal and nearly seven instrumental numbers (Greg Leisz’s 5½-minute take on “Wild Mountain Thyme” features a minute-long vocal passage toward the end).
INgrooves
The Stone Foxes refined their San Francisco blues-rock sound over two albums (three if you count “Black Rolling Thunder,” a CD-R they made for friends in 2006 whose title track was reprised on their self-titled official debut in 2008). After 2010’s “Bears & Bulls,” the group lost second guitarist Avi Vinocur, added keyboardist Elliott Peltzman and decided it was time to experiment. The quartet focused on lyrics, abandoned their Fox Den garage studio in favor of a real one and brought in Doug Boehm (Dr. Dog, Drive-By Truckers) to engineer and help produce.
429 Records
That’s right, a new release from CVB — seven years after the previous “New Roman Times,” 22 after that one’s predecessor “Key Lime Pie.” And this time they’re in a laid-back yet playful mood.
New West
In 2008, Lauderdale released an album as Jim Lauderdale and the Dream Players (James Burton, Steve Sheehan, Al Perkins, Glen D. Hardin, Gary Tallent and Ron Tutt). Now comes his dream duets album with fellow Nashville singer-songwriter Buddy Miller, in which the pair unleash a set of modern traditional noncomformist country — with an edge — on an unsuspecting public.
