DISCOGRAPHY

Gun Outfit: Out of Range (PoB-036)

Like a stone eroded by years in the arroyo, Gun Outfit’s “Western expanse” aesthetic of guitar levitations and honky-tonk hexes has become gradually smoother. Their fifth LP ranks as their most brutally beautiful statement yet. Drawing from mythologies both classical and postmodern, Out of Range builds a world in which Brueghel, St. Augustine, and the goddess Cybele ride with John Ford, Samuel Beckett, and Wallace Stevens on a Orphic-Gnostic suicide drive towards the hallucinatory vanishing points of the Southwestern desert, debating the denouement of the decaying American dream.

The Weather Station: The Weather Station (PoB-035)

On her fourth (and tellingly self-titled) album as The Weather Station, Tamara Lindeman reinvents, and more deeply roots, her extraordinary, acclaimed songcraft, framing her precisely detailed, exquisitely wrought prose-poem narratives in bolder and more cinematic musical settings. The result is her most sonically direct and emotionally candid statement to date, a work of profound urgency and artistic generosity.

James Elkington: Wintres Woma (PoB-034)

Drawing from British folk, avant-rock, and jazz traditions alike, Wintres Woma—Old English for “the sound of winter”—is James Elkington’s debut solo record, but you’ve likely heard his masterful guitar playing and arranging with Jeff Tweedy, Richard Thompson, Steve Gunn, Michael Chapman, and Joan Shelley, to name just a few of his many enthusiastic admirers. His assured album, recorded at Wilco’s Loft, is baroquely detailed and beautifully constructed, featuring both his baritone vocals and some of Chicago’s finest musicians, including Tomeka Reid.

Bonnie “Prince” Billy & Nathan Salsburg EP (PoB-037)

“Our names are Sals and Bonnie, two rounder boys you know”: In which the intrepid Louisville duo gamely paddle forth to explore two Kentucky creeks, singing an ode to Beargrass and meeting their match in two hitchhiking, car-riding young ladies of the Cigarette Crew. This delightful 45rpm 7″ EP, the pair’s first recorded artifact, is limited to an edition of 2000 copies, originally released on Record Store Day, April 22, 2017. Hop in.

Jake Xerxes Fussell: What in the Natural World (PoB-031)

Fussell follows his celebrated s/t debut with a moving new album of Natural Questions in the form of transmogrified folk/blues koans. This time these radiant ancient tunes tone several shades darker while amplifying their absurdist humor, illuminating our national, and psychic, predicaments. Featuring art by Roger Brown and contributions from three notable Nathans—Bowles, Salsburg, and Golub—as well as Joan Shelley and Casey Toll.

Mind Over Mirrors: Undying Color (PoB-032)

The new album by the ever-evolving project of Jaime Fennelly is his most ambitious and spellbinding set of roiling, meditative recordings to date, and the first to supplement his foundational arsenal of Indian pedal harmonium, analog synthesizers, and incantatory voices with a full ensemble, including Janet Beveridge Bean (Eleventh Dream Day), Jim Becker (Califone), Haley Fohr (Circuit des Yeux), and Jon Mueller (Death Blues).

Promised Land Sound: “By the Rain” (PoB-038)

On the eve of their first-ever tour of the UK and EU, Nashville’s Promised Land Sound holed up in the studio with Pat Sansone (Wilco) and Billy Bennett (MGMT) to cut their first official recording since their acclaimed 2015 album For Use and Delight. It’s now available as a digital-only single here, or via your favorite platform for digital music.

Michael Chapman: 50 (PoB-029)

After five decades of recording and touring, veteran British songwriter and guitar sage Michael Chapman has finally made what he calls his “American record,” and the aptly titled 50 now stands as his late career masterwork, a moving legacy statement by a legend. Backed by Steve Gunn (who also produced), Nathan Bowles, James Elkington, Jason Meagher, Jimy SeiTang, and Bridget St John, Chapman tears into both bold renderings of new songs and radical reinterpretations of material from his revered catalog, his world-weary whispers assuming the incandescent power of prophecy.

Terry Allen: Lubbock (on everything) (PoB-027)

Allen’s deeply moving second masterpiece, a satirical memory palace to his West Texas hometown, is often cited as the urtext of alt-country. Produced in collaboration with the artist and remastered from the original tapes, this is the definitive edition: the first to correct the tape speed inconsistencies on all prior versions; the first U.S. vinyl reissue; the first CD to restore the full track listing; and the first to contextualize the record within Allen’s 50-year career.

Itasca: Open to Chance (PoB-030)

The music of L.A.-based guitarist, singer, and songwriter Kayla Cohen is mutable and multivalent, richly allusive of the hermetic worlds of private-press canyon-cult mystics and East Coast noiseniks alike. Her adept fingerstyle guitar work—nimble but unshowy, always at the service of framing her plaintively unspooling modal progressions and gorgeous, moonlit voice—centers these melancholy pastorales in a hazy, heat-mirage space equally suggestive of familiarity and distance, community and anomie. Itasca’s enchanting, acid folk-inflected PoB debut is also the first to feature a full band.