A concept album about gigantic household appliances taking over the world? No such luck. As the images of Hank Williams, Bob Dylan and Sun-era Elvis floating in the background might indicate, this Nashville band is strictly old school, singing about unemployed riverboat workers, covering Woody Guthrie and plucking banjos like there was no tomorrow. Produced by David Rawlings, Big Iron World boasts the expected barnstormers ("Cocaine Habit") and late-night meditations ("God's Got It") alongside a handful of folkie sing-a-longs ("Down Home Girl") and a thoroughly unexpected reference to Karl Rove. And where else are you going to hear songstress Gillian Welch banging away on the drums? --Aidin Vaziri
During the "folk music-scare" of the early 1960s, a bunch of white middle-class youths with names like the Greenbriar Boys and the Even Dozen Jug Band discovered the mountain music of the Stanley Brothers, Skillet Lickers, and Uncle Dave Macon and set about introducing it to the country's college kids. Four decades later, the members of OCMS fit the profile of those early revivalists, yet if anything they have tapped deeper into the primal elements of an American art form. As demonstrated on their debut, they have assimilated not just the sound--banjos, harmonicas, acoustic guitar and bass--but more importantly the haunting spirit of music that was made to keep hard times at bay. How else to explain their ability to take a well-worn chestnut like "CC Rider" and infuse it with an energy that reveals once again why it is a classic? Not content to live completely in the past, they wrote "Big Time in the Jungle," which, though it is about Vietnam, could easily be transposed to 2004's desert conflicts. Kindred spirit and producer David Rawlings (Gillian Welch's longtime collaborator) has kept their energy intact, but one can only wonder what sort of magic they must deliver live. --Michael Ross
