Independent folk-rock lives, breathes, and is making good music -- exhibit A,  David Bethany, with a great new album, True Love. David is a "seasoned" Sullivans Island, SC artist who's done a fair amount of thinking and songwriting just off the continent's edge, from an island perspective. The result is a thoughtful, mature commentary on love and life, twelve new songs that get very personal; the voice is honest, the words are true. He has an attitude, for sure, but it's a good attitude. 

David's "previous life" was in rock & roll (Killer Whales), and he's as comfortable  fronting an electric band with a horn line as he is with an acoustic guitar. He covers the stylistic bases in this collection, a tasty and melodical musical salad with ample dressing.   Excellent players and production by David and Jay Miley, and the horn arrangements and backup vocals are very hip. As Leicester Bangs says, True Love  "will undoubtedly be a massive hit in some as yet undiscovered parallel universe, where such things as genuine soul and tender, heartfelt songwriting are coveted."  We concur...

Reviewed by Joe Ross...

Thomas Porter may be the youngest member of the Copper River Band, but he’s also the current front man, guitarist, lead vocalist and primary songwriter for the Arizona-based group together since late-2004 when Bob Denoncourt, John Thompson, Jim Govern, and Charlie Edsall formed the band. When John and Charlie moved on to other endeavors, the lineup supplemented Bob (bass, vocals) and Jim (mandolin) with three other excellent musicians and vocalists -- guitarist Thomas Porter (since 2005), fiddler Doug Bartlett and banjo-player Dick Brown (since 2010).

Emphasizing all-original material, “Trolley Days” kicks off with a nostalgic tribute to the popular Phoenix Street Railway System that operated from 1887 to 1948 and had the motto “Ride a mile and smile the while.” Porter’s historically accurate song mentions the nickel fare, horse-drawn cars that were converted to electric power in 1893, and the 1948 car barn fire that led to the trolleys’ replacement with buses.

Reviewed by Joe Ross....

Dale Ann Bradley is a defining bluegrass voice of our time. After reviewing Dale Ann Bradley’s third solo album project “Catch Tomorrow” back in 2007, I felt she was perfectly poised to break through and win IBMA’s Female Vocalist of the Year Award, an honor she’d been nominated for in 2006. Sure enough, Dale Ann subsequently won the award for three years running, in 2007, 2008 and 2009. Dale Ann’s 2011 release “Somewhere South of Crazy” documents the artist’s musical maturity, and it is also acknowledges the strength of her 26-year vocal collaboration with Steve Gulley, a fine guitarist and singer in his own right who also contributed to writing “Restoring the Love.” Others singing some harmony vocals on this CD include Pam Tillis (Somewhere South of Crazy), Kim Fox (Round and Round, Summer Breeze, Next to Nothing), and Sierra Hull (Come Home Good Boy). Hull’s nimble-fingered mandolin playing is always a treat to hear. Other noteworthy instrumental support comes from Stuart Duncan, Mike Bub, Andy Hall, Matt Combs, David Long, Mike Summer and the album’s astute producer Alison Brown.

Orriel Smith's debut album, A Voice In The Wind, was released by Columbia nearly 50 years ago. In the intervening years, Ms. Smith has released several albums of “cluckoratora”, wherein she clucks famous arias from the likes of Mozart, Verdi, and Puccini. However, her heart has always been close to the folk songs of her youth. She returns there for her new release, A Voice Forever In the Wind.

This from Jeff Penczak's review on Terrascope:

Accompanying herself on guitar and with sparse orchestral arrangements performed by Don French, Smith delivers an impassioned collection of traditional folk songs from Ireland, Britain, America, Mexico, Russia, and Aotearoa/New Zealand. The backing ranges from a softly intertwined guitar and orchestra on opener, ‘She Moved Through The Fair’ to her gently plucked acoustic guitar on ‘Lady Mary’ and ‘Songs My Mother Taught Me’, to the a capella marvel, ‘Come All You Fair and Tender Ladies’ that finds her in as fresh and fine a voice as those early recordings.