Picking the best folk and Americana records of the year isn't nearly as hard as discarding those great records that just didn't feel right stuck in the category.
Releases by Calexico and DeVotchKa felt far too worldly to pigeonhole as folk or country, for instance, while Blitzen Trapper's fantastic Furr smells more like the Kinks than Neil Young. [Editor's note: That's why we put it on our indie-rock list.] We likewise discarded Shearwater's near-masterpiece Rook, despite the fact that the album
They are perhaps rock's most mythical treasure trove of performances, more than 100 songs recorded on low-quality tape rolling on a 2-track recorder by six musician friends mostly fucking around in 1967.
But the legend and impact of the so-called "Basement Tapes" (actually recorded in three different locations) would way outstrip the casual way in which they were recorded. In the process, they would turn the Hawks into the Band, drive Bob Dylan to a new direction (John Wesley Harding, Nash
Heartless Bastards
The Mountain
www.heartlessbastards.com
Gnarlier than a century-old Live Oak, Heartless Bastards' The Mountain plugs the Cincinnati-born trio's scorching postmodern blues - their debut, 2006's All This Time, could skin a cat - into the eerie backwoods folk of Greil Marcus' semi-mythical "old, weird America." Opener "The Mountain" is an epic Neil Young & Crazy Horse earth-mover, with psychedelic pedal-steel flourishes that help singer Erika Wennerstrom (who has since
