New online music magazine

The Bluegrassspecial.com is a new online music magazine edited by David McGee, a former editor at Rolling Stone and Managing Editor of Spin Magazine. The Bluegrass Special.com covers Americana, world music, blues and gospel, and a healthy dose of rock and roll. In the latest issue, I have a review of The Bairns, the new album by Rachel Unthank and the Winterset, who are being hailed in Britain as the biggest thing in British folk-rock since Richard Thompson. Here's how it begins:

"Bob Dylan once said something about how the only true death you can feel in music was in folk music. Particularly, I'd guess he was thinking about the body of song that came down off the southeastern American mountains, the Appalachian tradition that forms the core of the American folk tradition. Where that death came from was the northern border counties of England and southern Scotland, a region that has some of the grimmest history of any place in Europe. It was the cockpit of the centuries-long, savage back and forth struggle between England and Scotland, regularly burned over by brutal scorched earth warfare and in between ravaged by institutionalized raiding between the Border clans. The peasants who had taken the brunt of this for generations took their first chance when the New World opened up, and fled to the American back country, bringing the strain of darkness and harsh fatalism to the mood of the Appalachian culture.

Now we're hearing from two sisters and their friends who haven't fled, but rather have dug deep into the darkness and occasional buried golden beauty of their culture, and ingeniously molded it into something new and challenging..."

For the rest of it, go here...