Baby Robot Media

Americana UK

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Americana UK debuts the title track from E.Z. Shakes’ forthcoming LP, The Spirit, calling it “apocalyptic…”

Zach Seibert formed E.Z. Shakes with Todd T. Hicks as an acoustic duo – Seibert on guitar and Hicks on banjo and pedal steel – in 2017 and things have moved pretty quickly since then, the band have two EPs and an album under their belt and another album on the way.  They also grew to a five piece with John Furr adding electric guitar, acoustic guitar and  keyboards, Stanford Gardner on percussion and bass by Jim Taylor.  John Furr also acts as the in-house producer on this fuller sound.  On the new record the band recruited Mitch Easter (the producer of seminal albums by R.E.M. and Pavement) to mix the album at his Fidelitorium studio.

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AmericanaUK premieres new track “Immortal” from Nashville Americana artist Laura Rabell

laura rabell americana country singer songwriter nashville new album immortal americanaUK

It’s safe to say that Laura Rabell is acquainted with the machinations of Momus, the personification of satire and mockery in Greek myth.  For he surely had her marked down for an encounter with irony when she announced in 2019 that her debut album would be entitled ‘Immortal‘. But we’ll let her explain. She laughs darkly at the recollection: “I guess you shouldn’t call the Titanic unsinkable. I guess you shouldn’t call your first album ‘Immortal’. You’re just asking for it.”  It, in this case, was the cancer diagnosis that Rabell received three weeks later.  The album release was pushed back, but with Laura Rabell’s successful treatment it’s ready to go this year. READ MORE…

 

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Americana UK weighs in on Craig Gerdes’ new album Tough As Nails, compares him to Sturgill Simpson, Tyler Childers, and Cody Jinks

craig gerdes tough as nails americana uk country outlaw publicity pr baby robot media

Make no mistake this is a country album, a no-nonsense, old fashioned honest to god working-man’s country record. And it’s as fine a one as you will hear this year: if not next year as well, and last year for that matter. It doesn’t flirt with other genres, it’s the sort of record about which people say things like (genuine but misappropriated quotes alert) “This is real country and this is what we’ve been yearning for” or Craig Gerdes has “saved us from Luke Bryan, Blake Shelton and all the other sh*tty pop country garbage” or “At last, this young man is true country” or “why oh why don’t they make country like this anymore”. Or… whatever.

Thing is, in truth, they do make records like this, lots of ‘em, every week it seems. You just need to keep your eyes and ears open, oh and don’t forget to check out AUK on a regular basis! A few of these may be familiar to you – remember the bounce we got hearing Sturgill Simpson, Tyler Childers, Cody Jinks, Chris Stapelton, John Moreland, Wheeler Walker, Whitey Morgan, Colter Wall….. for the first time? We might have lost the odd one of these to desperately dull fretwinking electronic Southern krautrock pastiche along the way but we can add Craig Gerdes to this list; somewhere near the very top if it’s being graded. This record is as good as anything that anyone on it produced at the start of their careers.

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Americana UK debuts new song from Margaret Chavez, “I Virgo,” calling it a “piercing blend of folk and rock”

Crunching guitars usher in ‘I Virgo‘ before it is set free and launched into a stratospheric piercing blend of folk and rock and reverb heavy Cosmic American Music – Phosphorescent is in there, Mercury Rev and Midlake too but it’s a blissful sound that is really all its own.  ‘I Virgo‘ is  taken from Margaret Chavez’s new album ‘Into An Atmosphere‘ which has been described as a “folk-rock opus” – but it’s more than that.

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Americana UK spotlights the ‘biting wit’ of Michelle Billingsley’s new single ‘Gaslighting’

michelle billingsley gaslighting not the marrying kind americana alt country folk indie folk singer songwriter baby robot media music publicity PR
After years of singing Michelle Billingsley found that she had something to say. It was, she recalls, an epiphany that came direct from frustration “I remember walking down the street because the CTA rush hour buses come every 25 minutes, I was thinking about how hard it was to find something to sing in my range, and then this bubble burst in my head and I thought, ‘I can write songs and say whatever I want.’ ” And thus was her first album Not the Marrying Kind born – it’s out on June 12th on Western Myth Records.
 
The subjects of her songs are diverse – but she approaches them with a biting wit, which today’s premiere exemplifies. It’s something of a grandchild of ‘Seven Drunken Nights’ as, through a series of good and reasonable explanations Michelle Billingsley patiently explains to her partner how the things he is seeing are not what he thinks they are: “I did nothing wrong love I did nothing wrong / Well what you thought was his hand down my dress / It was innocent I swear, hey listen to this / His watch got caught in the loop of my belt / So you see Hun’ he was just trying to help.” It’s all in a tongue-in cheek gently honky-tonkin’ spirit. READ MORE…