Encore Records

Ryan Bingham

Junky Star

All 12 songs on Junky Star were written by Bingham and performed by his longtime band The Dead Horses, featuring Matt Smith (drums), Elijah Ford (bass) and Corby Shaub (guitar/mandolin).

Burnett created a recording environment that perfectly complimented the themes and textures of Bingham’s reflective songwriting and gravelly voice.

The tracks on Junky Star range from narratives with vivid imagery (“The Poet”), to introspective confessionals (“Hallelujah”), to bluesy roadhouse stomps (“Direction Of The Wind”) to Sticky Fingers-era Stones (“Depression”). “Yesterday’s Blues” and “Lay My Head On The Rail” showcase Bingham’s gift for writing compelling folk balladry that makes you hang on his every word.

Great Lake Swimmers

Lost Channels

U.S. only deluxe vinyl LP edition includes a bonus seven-inch single plus a download code for the entire album. Lost Channels is the fourth album by the masters of ‘Ambient Zen Americana’, Great Lake Swimmers. Often compared to the likes of Nick Drake, Iron and Wine, Red House Painters and ‘After the Gold Rush’-era Neil Young, the new album by Tony Dekker and Co. nods occasionally in the more commercial direction of R.E.M. while simultaneously continuing to deliver the ‘starkly evocative and melodically melancholic’ (Paste magazine) brand of Folk Rock for which his band are renowned. Sony. 2010.

Luke Doucet

Steel City Trawler

On Steel City Trawler, Luke approaches his favourite topics - geography, love and the existential labyrinths of human understanding - with a classic rock ethos and a producer, Andrew Scott (Sloan), at the helm.

The creative partnership was a gamble for both, but Steel City Trawler emerged as a cleverly assembled balance of Luke’s observation-driven commentaries on place, family and personal belief with the ABC’s of rock and roll.

Eels

Tomorrow Morning

Just when you thought it couldn’t get any darker for Mark Oliver Everett (aka E)...it doesn’t.

On the third Eels album in 14 months, Everett completes a trilogy that began with the rockist Hombre Lobo in June of 2009, which addressed the ravenous hunger and cost of desire.

In January 2010, End Times detailed in a low-key and acoustic manner, often in sometimes embarrassingly intimate terms, the shattering toll of a broken relationship.

Tomorrow Morning emerges on the other side of both.

This 14-song collection meditates on E’s own eccentric brand of optimism. The tunes carry his requisite catchy melodies, hooks, and compelling arrangements, but the textures are different from anything he’s released before because most of it is electronic and programmed (though his guitar, Koool G Murder’s bass and keys, and Knuckles’ drums are present, too).

Jenny and Johnny

I’m Having Fun Now

Jenny and Johnny first started working together in Los Angeles in 2005, after being introduced by Conor Oberst.

The exuberance of love songs like ‘Scissor Runner’ mask some of the record’s darkness, with Lewis chronicling the economic demise of her beloved California in ‘Big Wave’, Rice’s haunting vocal on ‘Animal’, and both songwriters raising a middle-finger kiss off in the acerbic ‘My Pet Snakes’.

The overall result is genuine and original pop music for ‘Right Now’. This is not a Rilo Kiley record, a Jenny Lewis record, or a Johnathan Rice record. This is Jenny and Johnny

Richard Thompson

Dream Attic

Penned during a short and inspired burst of creative outpouring, the songs were performed during a West Coast tour in February of this year, and the bulk of the performances that made the album come from three shows at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco.

“I don’t think musicians playing on their own are particularly interesting, it’s only when they play in front of an audience that something interesting happens,” Thompson said in an interview at one of the shows.

The musicians appearing on the album with Thompson are Pete Zorn (guitars, flute, sax, mandolin), Michael Jerome (drums), Taras Prodaniuk (bass), and Joel Zifkin (violin, mandolin).

James Blackshaw

All Is Falling

All Is Falling was the first of James Blackshaw’s albums on which he played electric 12-string guitar.

But while earlier efforts of his drew comparisons to vintage folk guitarists, this is far from folk-rock, and indeed so far from folk or rock that it might not be appropriate to even categorize it as popular music. Blackshaw also plays piano, glockenspiel, and percussion on the record, though when he does use 12-string electric guitar, it’s not heavily amplified.

The eight largely instrumental pieces (voices are heard counting at one point) on the 45-minute CD—divided into tracks plainly titled “Part 1,” “Part 2,” and so on up to “Part 8”—are much more like a classical work than a folk one, performed with considerable assistance from other musicians on violin, cello, flute, alto saxophone, and glockenspiel.

John Mellencamp

No Better Than This

No Better Than This is an album of all new original songs that was recorded at a variety of historically significant locations around the south.

The album was produced by T-Bone Burnett who earlier collaborated with Mellencamp on the much-lauded Life Death Love and Freedom.

No Better Than This was recorded over the course of a few break days afforded Mellencamp when he was on tour of minor league ball parks last year, sharing the bill with Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson.

The album was recorded on vintage equipment - a 55 year old Ampex tape recorder with just one microphone - in Savannah at the First African Baptist Church, in Memphis at Sun Studios and in San Antonio in room 411 of the Gunter Hotel.

Mellencamp wrote the 13 songs included on the album during a 13 day span last spring.

Ray Lamontagne

God Willin’ & the Creek Don’t Rise

Entirely self produced (for the first time) the album was recorded in two weeks at LaMontagne’s home in the woods of western Massachusetts.

The newly restored historic home served as a homemade recording studio for Ray and his fellow musicians.

With Ray’s vocals at the forefront of the songs and a loose, almost live sounding recording, the album stands as a testament to a band at the height of their powers. The newly coined ‘Pariah Dogs’, consists of Jay Bellarose (drums), Jennifer Condos (bass), Patrick Warren (keyboard), Eric Heywood (guitar) and Greg Leisz (pedal steel guitar).

Frazey Ford

Obadiah

Debut solo release from the Be Good Tanyas frontwoman.

Obadiah combines Frazey’s gorgeous sultry vocals that helped define the Tanyas’ sound, with her ever growing love for soul music, adding a rich fullness and bottom end to the 13 tracks the comprise the debut.

Recorded during a blissful Vancouver summer, Obadiah is a collection of songs hand-carved by the hardships and exaltations of life, and stained with the rich colors of soul and folk music that fueled artists like Joni Mitchell, Ann Peebles, Neil Young, and Donny Hathaway.