Music

14-song instrumental Christmas Album by Chicago guitarist Joel Paterson, a multi-track guitar extravaganza in the tradition of Les Paul, Chet Atkins, and many more of Joel's biggest heroes and influences.

It's "off-the-beaten-path Americana." It's the simple meeting the complex, traditional meeting modern, stick-to-your-guns resoluteness meeting adaptation. Breaks new artistic ground but remains in character.

The duality of big and broad vs. microscopic and narrow is ever-present, especially as the group explores untapped genres, dynamic and emotional touches, intersecting and introspective storylines, and remote edges of the galaxy.

This collaboration between Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter Robbie Fulks and rock-and-roll royalty Linda Gail Lewis, gleefully lives up to its title. Subversive as it is reverential.

Years solidifies the point: Sarah Shook & the Disarmers have moved from getting people’s attention to commanding it. The album is resolute, blunt, and unflinching.

It’s a wild, electric phantasmagoria of blues, rock, garage, and soul; it blasts off into diverse orbits only to come back together into a singular Savage cosmology.

Informed as much by the wide-open landscapes of her homeland as the intimate writing circles of Nashville, 'Don't Talk About It' may range far and wide but always maintains a firm sense of place. Echoes of first wave UK power pop and jangly punk intersect with the every(wo)man indie and pop-inflected muscle of Best Coast.