Blues harp maestro James Cotton was 77 at the time of this album's release. He can barely sing anymore, and the years of playing and touring have left his voice a hoarse croak, but make no mistake, he can still play the harp, and his stunning, overdriven blasts on the instrument are as powerful and as immediate as ever. He's the living embodiment of the Chicago blues, and one of the genre's last surviving founders of it, having mentored with the great Sonny Boy Williamson, and he recorded, played, and toured with Howlin' Wolf and Muddy Waters, cutting his first sides at the age of 19 for Chess Records. He's done this a long time, and as this delightful, joyous, stomping, and vibrant set shows, he doesn't need to sing to command the stage. . . . . Cotton may be cruising in on 80 years of age, but he's just released one of the best albums of his career. -- 4 of 5 stars AllMusic Guide
Spawned from some of the Twin Cities' seminal modern-rock groups of the 70s, 80s and 90s, The Badinovs have transformed a lifetime of love of music into an amalgam of the boundless inventiveness of Beatles-like pop mixed with modern, passionate, intelligent indie-rock. Their sound spans the sound of both sides of the Atlantic: from harmonious to raw, radiant to intense, and tender to jagged. . . . The Badinovs like to walk the tight-rope act of writing and performing complex, clever pop-rock that is equally catchy, lyrically captivating and fun. . . . -- ReverbNation
Known mostly via the Brothers Johnson's smash version of his psychedelic-soul fantasia "Strawberry Letter 23," R&B renegade Shuggie Otis recorded with heavyweights like Frank Zappa as a teen but fell out of favor with the music industry by his early twenties. This reissue pairs his metaphysically funky 1974 masterpiece, Inspiration Information, with a similarly spacey unreleased LP cut between 1975 and 2000 that positions this multi-instrumentalist as a missing link between Sly, Jimi, Stevie, Prince and Frank Ocean. Start with "Aht Uh Mi Hed," a beatbox symphony so uplifting you may feel your feet leaving the ground. -- 4 of 5 stars Rolling Stone
On Love Has Come for You, Martin's third album for Rounder Records, Brickell's lyrics bring those gracefully easy melodies to life, stretching them into likewise graceful songs with a sparse, whimsical, and artfully open-aired narrative style. Her singing sounds relaxed and unpressured, just like Martin's easy-rolling banjo lines, and the two of them together are no novelty act. . . . This is a sweet-sounding album with subtle depths, not really bluegrass, but a precisely gentle folk album that grows more graceful and revealing with each listen. -- 4 of 5 stars AllMusic Guide
Born in northern Niger, Bombino is an ethnic Tuareg, a nomadic tribe spread out across the Sahara Desert, and if he inherited a steady urge for going, it shows in his guitar playing, which is informed by the fluid, melodic, and graceful style of so many great African guitarists. But he's also listened and studied the playing of Jimi Hendrix and Mark Knopfler closely, and maybe a little of J.J. Cale . . . Bombino emerges as a sort of Dick Dale of the Sahara, with a guitar style that is uniquely all his own. For this, his second album, Bombino traveled to Nashville to record with the Black Keys' Dan Auerbach, and the result is a marvelous set, full of grit and funky elegance, a kind of mesh of Tuareg rhythms with Deep South delta country trance blues, and psychedelic, too, as if Jimi Hendrix and John Lee Hooker somehow got spliced together. It's a wonderful listen from start to finish, with heavily echoed vocals, and layers of snaky, sinewy guitar lines that build and weave, separate and expand as each track goes on, until everything seems to burst transformed into the immense sonic space of an ocean, or a desert, for that matter. . . . -- 4.5 of 5 stars AllMusic Guide