Blog: PopMatters

This year saw a flood of plaid-shirted indie-roots bands building on the beardy throwbacks who gained country-rock traction in 2008. And while mainstream country music continued its evolution into '80s pop metal, plenty of roots acts turned the other direction with back-to-basics records. Last year, when introducing our Americana year-end list, we mentioned the collapse of the print version of No Depression magazine, a longtime home-base for roots-oriented music news and reviews. This year saw the reorganization of No Depression from an editorial model that assigns work to a staff of writers into the No Depression Community, a blog/forum [...]