Dark End Road

Lowlights is Western music from Redwood country, Humbolt County, CA. With "trailer park chic" trying to sell Americana these days like a diet soda, the term alternative country feels like it has fast become a dirty word. But this heart wrenching follow up to the universally critically acclaimed debut by New Mexico troubadour Dameon Lee, who now resides in rural northern California, keeps the beacon burning for dilettantes and true believers. A couple of mid tempo rockers send the sawdust flying in this collection of heartbreak ditties, but the jewels are its breathtakingly beautiful ballads. From the hauntingly intimate to the epic, these achingly blissful, divinely melancholy laments to loss and love weave a whiskey-soaked tapestry of rapturous lap steels, plaintive fiddles, bar-room-stripped keys and angelic harmonies to velvet, smoking gun vocals and the obligatory twang of six strings to create a cowboy drugstore of salves for the broken hearted.