LAMBCHOP - Nixon (Expanded Edition) / LUCINDA WILLIAMS - S/T (25th Anniversary Reissue) / UNCLE TUPELO - No Depression (Legacy Edition)
Friday, February 21, 2014 at 05:55PM 
Three modern Americana classics receive the deluxe treatment they deserve, as each act's major players are still active, and their original approaches continue to exert an influence on peers and devotees in the current roots music landscape.
"Starting with the swell of horns in the middle of album opener 'The Old Gold Shoe,' Nixon glides easily from one unexpected grace note to the next, peppering in funk, R&B, gospel, country, vintage folk—and integrating them all, not presenting them discretely. Lambchop has always taken its Nashville origins seriously, making use of the wide variety of talented musicians who live and work in Music City. The double-CD includes the original album plus a bonus disc containing White Sessions 1998: How I Met Cat Power, a remastered live solo session Kurt recorded in 1998." - Merge Records
"Her first two albums, Ramblin' and Happy Woman Blues, were released in relatively quick succession in 1979 and 1980. Then, for certainly not the last time in her career, she went dark. But when this self-titled album emerged those eight years later, it was, in a lot of ways, the true coming out party for Lucinda Williams the artist. Over the next fifteen years, she would put out five albums that would prove her as a truly remarkable songwriter, but it's 1988's Lucinda Williams that gives us the first fleshed-out vision of the artist to come. It’s appropriate the album is self-titled, as if Williams herself knew what she had on her hands." - Aquarian Drunkard
"Pitched as 'Hüsker Dü meets Woody Guthrie,' Uncle Tupelo's 1990 debut made the countrypunk notions of the Mekons, the Meat Puppets and others into a raison d'être, furthering a major movement. This expanded reissue adds Not Forever, Just for Now, the 1989 demo tape that got them signed. Its 10 songs, recorded in an attic in Champaign, Illinois, were beefed up on No Depression (and its sister single, the Midwest indie-rock boozer anthem 'I Got Drunk'), but Not Forever shows a vision startlingly complete, and its scrappiness occasionally serves the songs better–see 'Whiskey Bottle,' with harmonica instead of pedal steel." - Rolling Stone
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