PLUS: Summer Camps

Cover Story

Texas Platters

Largely low-key musically over the past decade since moving to Texas and releasing 2010’s A Patch of Blue Sky, Kevin Welch doubled down this year with 2-CD retrospective The Dead Reckoning Years and now a platter of new tunes. The career folkie, Southern California native, Oklahoma son, and Nashville expat, 63, retains a rough, distinctive…

by Doug Freeman

Texas Platters

Spaghetti Western opener “Side Saddle Strut” sets the scene for Sheverb’s debut as Betty Benedeadly, Xina Ocasio, and Fern Rojas set off across a psychedelic desert. The Austin trio’s instrumental warps and riffs run variations on a theme, most interesting in the heavier shudder of “Thunder Lizard” and slow, heated whips of “Western Leone.” There…

by Doug Freeman

Texas Platters

Kendall Beard sings with a breathless urgency, which complements her songwriting on sophomore LP Here Comes Trouble through highlights “Ready to Roll,” “Run While You Can,” and the anthemic “Rock This City.” The songwriter’s Love & Chaos partner AJ Vallejo delivers surefire contemporary country production to match Beard’s big and defiant sound as she shoots…

by Doug Freeman

Texas Platters

Stephanie Urbina Jones’ sixth studio full-length reworks familiar country classics into mariachi honky-tonk as revelatory as it is surprising. Not everything strikes as dramatically reimagined as cantina kicker “Walking After Midnight” or the siesta-serenaded “Rose Garden,” but even straight interpretations of “For the Good Times” and “Silver Wings” stun via the San Antone native’s gorgeous,…

by Doug Freeman

Texas Platters

These Austinites make road trip music, and though Deltas takes the scenic route, it runs out of gas. It’s a stylistic step forward from Reddening West’s previous release, 2016 EP Where We Started, but the new full-length still gets caught in its own wash. Overly spacey singing contributes to the froth; Matt Evans’ soothing timbre…

by Hannah Wisterman

Texas Platters

On the singer’s first full-length since 2012 debut Eastern Soul, Nagavalli Medicharla plunges into her classical Indian training for a deeply spiritual, meditative offering. Often, contemporary Eastern soul fuses to secular, English-language lyrics, Latin rock, and pop; but Nagavalli eschews the Austin dialect for her native tongue, emoting full-throated and singularly driven by melody. The…

by Christina Garcia

Quote of the Week

“We’re never up there playing around and wasting people’s time.” – Council Member Leslie Pool at Tuesday’s work-session discussion on making Council meetings more efficient and accessible. Others may disagree! See “City Council Heads Into Holiday Break Wrestling With Process,” Dec. 14.

by Chronicle Staff

Texas Platters

Austin crooner Aaron Stephens matures into an R&B sound on second full-length Focus. The nine-track keeper opens with “Walkin,'” whose drifting acoustic licks are soon joined by irresistible sax dubs and Stephens’ smooth voice, which time and age have added a little more gravel to. Contrary to its title, the LP samples several distinct styles,…

by Clara Wang

Texas Platters

Veteran CenTex instrumental combo This Will Destroy You continues putting its own spin on post-rock cliches with fifth LP New Others Part One. Chief composers Jeremy Galindo and Christopher King pursue a cinematic feel herein, creating a symphonic shoegaze that paints aural pictures in the mind’s eye. Guitars sound like keyboards, dissonance creates overtones that…

by Michael Toland

Soccer Watch

MLS2ATX had a pretty good week, with news coming out of Ohio that a new ownership team for the Columbus Crew is closing in on a stadium plan with the city and county there, which clears the way for the current ownership, Precourt Sports Ventures, to start their expansion team, Austin FC. Meanwhile, signs are…

by Nick Barbaro

Texas Platters

Name Sayers’ debut LP spins a torch-lit ritual of loud, Gothic post-folk led by a singer whose hovering baritone and metaphysical command position him as the musical next of kin to Nick Cave and PJ Harvey (had the onetime lovers ever procreated). Eight scriptures from the ATX fourpiece unfold with the tribal, floor-tom pounding of…

by Kevin Curtin

Headlines

City Council meets today, Dec. 13, for its final meeting of the year. Expect discussions on the APD’s staffing plan, transfer of ETJ land to Dripping Springs, and rules regarding city officials and gifts. APD: Diversity Schmiversity: Chief Brian Manley announced he would appoint Todd Smith and Rich Guajardo as new assistant chiefs. This means…

by Chronicle Staff

Mr. Smarty Pants Knows

Genghis Khan’s Mongol horde probably had rampant hepatitis B, according to researchers at Cambridge University. According to The New York Times, NASA researchers say the accelerated destruction of Borneo’s forests for oil-palm cultivation contributed to the largest single-year global increase in carbon emissions in two millennia. Japanese folklore describes a Namazu, a giant catfish that…

by Mr. Smarty Pants

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