Brent Amaker & the Rodeo – Take It By the Horns
Similar artists: Johnny Cash, Orville Peck, The Mavericks
Genre: Americana, Southern Rock
It’s hard to find any people who don’t have an opinion about what has been dubbed “country music.” The majority of them, naturally, do not live in the United States and haven’t ever sought out this style of music or their listening pleasure. Popular culture is, however, a wonderful connecting agent.
You’re bound to hear something familiar in the music of Brent Amaker & the Rodeo, no matter your relationship with Northern American music, and it’s bound to bring a smile to your face. This is because, like the Western movies of old, like Marlboro man strutting through the Southern plains, or like Johnny Cash playing his music for prisoners, the essence of country music and of the Old West are one of the greatest imports of the U.S.
Brent Amaker & the Rodeo’s “Take It By the Horns” is a wonderfully irreverent way of playing country music, a kind of hyped-up hybrid of Devo’s “Whip It” and Jerry Lee Lewis’ “Great Balls of Fire.” There’s something cartoonish and wholly memorable captured in the vocals. It’s the kind of song that kids would learn upon hearing it just the first time and only later in life realize just what they were singing.
Bess Atwell – The Weeping
Genre: Folk, Alt Pop
Nowadays, just as much as throughout history, it’s easy to see all the differences between us and other people. Hell, we have non-stop news coverage trying to remind us at every step of why we should distrust those are that dissimilar to us. Still, there are certain things that we can all agree on. There are certain emotions that everybody understands that do not need to be translated and that even a newborn baby will recognize.
Bess Atwell’s emotional, thoughtful songwriting plays around with those universal truths. Yes, this is music written with the purpose of impacting as many people as possible. This is, after all, what pop music does. But this is not always a bad thing. After all, music can offer consolation without taking much. That’s why music that can unite people is a great gift.
Bess Atwell’s “The Weeping” isn’t so much a song as an exercise of tapping directly into human emotion. It’s the singing and the arrangement that do the most to describe the songwriter’s intention. This is music for the rainy days that all of us, without exception, must occasionally face. It’s the kind of song whose success is not dependent on the audience understanding the words or being fans of this acoustic pop genre. What the voice naturally captures does all of the heavy lifting.
