OCMS

I'm still chipping away at all the music reviews I owe you, but I keep buying more music, so I make little progress. Right now I'm listening to Big Iron World from Old Crow Medicine Show, a band I first heard about on "All Things Considered." This is really old-timey-sounding music, and you know I love that in a CD, but I will say that this is almost too old-timey-sounding even for me. But it has enough of a modern edge that it just makes the cut.

The band consists of Willie Watson on vocals and guitar, Ketch Secor (How great is that name?) on vocals and harmonica, Critter Fuqua (Really!) on vocals and banjo, Kevin Hayes on guitjo, and Morgan Jahnig on upright bass. Plus, Gillian Welch shows up on a few tracks, which is not surprising considering that the CD is produced by her longtime partner David Rawlings. But what is surprising is that she plays drums! Yes, drums. I wonder if there's anything she can't do—and really well.

Anyhow, as with so many CDs I get these days, I don't really enjoy listening to the whole thing straight through, but whenever one track comes up on my random shuffle, I dig it. I'm starting to think that this is a statement about the iPod generation, rather than the CDs I buy. In the old days, you'd buy a record and listen to Side A straight through, then flip it and listen to Side B straight through, then flip it, over and over, while reading the liner notes in their entirety. (Then you'd realize that you were out of beer and hadn't gone to any classes all day...oops!) Then came CDs, and there was no flipping, and you could easily skip the songs you didn't like—and the liner notes were printed in 2-point type, so that ended that. Now, I load a new CD right into my iTunes and then my 'Pod and listen to it a few times maybe, but then just let shuffle take over. Which is neither here nor there, just something I've noticed about how I listen to music these days.

Just to make sure I do some more music reviews soon, I hereby promise to review Cat Power's CD The Greatest this week too.

Comments

[Wendy]

Oh! I so love the Old Crow Medicine Show. And I love this CD. I love that acoustic string virtuosity. And there isn't enough harmonica in the world, either.

[Leah]

I just stumbled on O.C.M.S. and absolutely had to download a couple of their recent CDs from iTunes. I had been meaning to ask if you'd heard of them. Have you seen any of their videos - available on their website? Yummy bunch o' boys.