A giant of the West Coast bluegrass scene, Kathy Kallick has fashioned her own distinctive approach. It's both creative and traditional, integrated into a fabric that encompasses many influences from the genre's rich history. The thing is, Kallick is so good at what she does, and she's been recording so long, that she's entered the state in which any profound critical complaints were long ago exhausted; nothing is bad or close to it, but some of it will move you more than others.

We are free, however, to note that a new Kathy Kallick Band album is out and you the listener may expect familiar pleasures.

But it's not just that. Kallick offers up more variety than most, including the occasional project with her colleague and fellow band-leader Laurie Lewis. Not least of those is the magnificent tribute album honoring California bluegrass legends Vernon Williams & Ray Park, which I reviewed in this space on 27 September 2014. I am not inclined to separate samples of the genres of music I listen to into discrete sections of top-10 favorites. But if I were, Laurie & Kathy Sing the Songs of Vern & Ray would be somewhere in the bluegrass pile. I say that as someone who's consumed a lot of bluegrass in his time and is not automatically impressable.

Last time around, Kallick did a non-bluegrass two-disc remembrance of her mother Dodi Kallick (reviewed here 14 January 2023), remembering her years as a locally popular but commercially unrecorded folk singer in mid-century Chicago. On Dodi's half is a recording of mostly old folk songs, the other her daughter's recently cut versions of early country songs from the Carter Family, Kitty Wells and others.

The Lonesome Chronicles is so standard a bluegrass outing that the first six cuts actually feature the adjective "lonesome" in (I presume) deliberately cliched titles ("Just Ol' Lonesome Me & the Radio," "Never Been So Lonesome" and so on). They all make for pleasant enough listening, and most are more cheerful than a literal-minded listener would anticipate. While capably fashioned and performed (one would expect no less of a superior outfit like this one), they are, alas, not all that memorable.

The remaining eight cuts explore the bluegrass landscape with humor, sorrow, faith and wry observation but with scant surprise, the exception being a welcome, spirited interpretation of the late John Prine's "Souvenirs." It serves to remind us all that, sadly, there is no more where that comes from.

[ visit the Kathy Kallick Band's website ]