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| Roots Guitarist Mark Lemhouses' new album As Prudent Press Agency inform, Memphis-based Yellow Dog Records has released "The Great American Yard Sale" by acclaimed roots guitarist Mark Lemhouse on August 9th, 2005. Recorded in Memphis and in Lemhouse’s home of Salem, Oregon, "The Great American Yard Sale" is an eclectic tour through an American landscape filled with both darkness and light. With his 2003 debut album, "Big Lonesome Radio", Mark Lemhouse served notice that there was a major new voice in American roots music. Blending timeless acoustic blues guitar with distinctly contemporary songwriting, the disc received unanimous critical acclaim and earned a pair of W.C. Handy award nominations, including “Best New Artist Debut.” Now comes Lemhouse’s much-anticipated followup, "The Great American Yard Sale". Though much of his early acclaim came from the blues world, Lemhouse, like the great roots innovators who inspire him, is a restless spirit who can’t stay long in any single corner of the Americana landscape. While "Radio" saw him displaying formidable chops on acoustic National steel and North Mississippi-inflected electric guitar, "Yard Sale" finds the genre-busting guitarist plugging in and heading out to the Great Wide Open, adding banjo and electric lap steel to his panoramic musical vocabulary. Lemhouse was lauded for his distinctive original songs on "Big Lonesome Radio" (one of them, “Edwin’s Lament”, was included in the recent hit film “Hustle and Flow”), and "The Great American Yard Sale" completes his coming of age as a songwriter. Fully ten of "Yard Sale"’s twelve tracks are Mark’s own. Strong, new originals like “Scarlet”, “Paper Sack”, and “Salem” explore dark themes of addiction, desperation, and self-destruction, while “The Queen of Easy Street” and “You’re a Bastard” bristle with Lemhouse’s trademark brand of wry humor. The “Yard Sale” of the album’s title suggests the diversity of the album’s musical mix, which simultaneously reflects and upends influences ranging from Dock Boggs to Johnny Cash to Tom Waits. “Cluck Old Hen” re-imagines part of the old-time canon as a post-North Mississippi blues stomp, while the insistent drive of “Leroy Feller’s Blues” would sound at home in any outlaw film noir. Lemhouse’s fretwork shimmers on “Hazy” and “I’m Worried, ” while he requires nothing more than his banjo for the stark lament of “Never Me”. write your comments about the article :: © 2005 Jazz News :: home page |