Guitar Lives!

As music journalists, we try to stay on top of new releases, but there are so many of them that sometimes stuff that’s quite worthy of critical attention falls through the cracks. Chuck Roth’s Watergh0st Songs, which came out in January, was one of those albums for me. It’s about as up-my-alley as it could possibly be: a singer-songwriter record that’s also an experimental guitar record, which gives short shrift to neither side of that premise in its explorations of the other. It was released on Palalia Records, the label run by the great avant guitarist Bill Orcutt, who I’ve been a big fan of for years. I’m not sure how I missed it, but I’m glad to have found it eventually, and to be involved in a publication where we’re not so obsessed with timeliness that we’ll ignore a great record just because we’re a couple months late.