A master of America’s instrument with an abiding love for the people and their traditions – – despite everything. This is Clifton Hicks.
Popular Music
Pop Review: Gorillaz’s Exhilarating “Song Machine”
Song Machine rejuvenates the band’s core identity; it is the best music Gorillaz has made in a decade.
Folk Album Review: Fleet Foxes’ “Shore” — Finding Serenity in Anxious Times
For Fleet Foxes, Shore is impressively consistent. Each track presents a meticulously detailed soundscapes deepened by Robin Pecknold’s varied meditative perspectives.
Rap Album Review: Open Mike Eagle’s “Anime, Trauma, and Divorce” — Personal Matters
Open Mike Eagle may have written this album for himself, but many others will recognize themselves somewhere in his words and in his pain.
Music Review: Best New Songs – September, 2020
A selection of new songs that are about keeping sane in a world that seems increasingly out of everyone’s control — in nearly every sense.
Rap Album Review: Action Bronson — The World’s Rapper?
In Only For Dolphins, Bronson serves up his usual brand of excessive escapism, but it is offset by just enough emotional depth to suggest that he is maturing as a person and an artist.
Concert Review: Farm Aid 2020 — The Promise of the Real
When Willie dove into “On the Road Again” to close the set, singing of “making music with my friends,” one could envision the same hopes for Farm Aid to resume its annual trek to an amphitheater somewhere in America and stoke the communal cause.
Folk Album Review: Tyler Childers’s “Long Violent History” – An Appalachian Murder Ballad for Breonna Taylor
The Kentuckian’s message is one of both heritage and empathy — and the necessity of both.
Music Album Review: Lomelda’s “Hannah” — A Wonderful Tenderness
The intimate emotions captured by Hannah are enhanced by Lomelda’s ability to be both revelatory and inscrutable in the same breath.
Arts Remembrance: Fred “Toots” Hibbert — Resiliency in the Face of Struggle
As anyone who is familiar with “Toots” Hibbert’s near sixty-year career could testify, he was an artist who wrote songs that were guaranteed to transcend the contexts of their particular place and moment.