★★★★★
And the new The Odessa Tapes is one more - an important one. It's a recently discovered and newly restored recording of 14 songs the Flatlanders had cut at a studio in Odessa, Texas, in January 1972. It was near - by Texas standards - their home in Lubbock. That two months before they went to Nashville, making this their earliest known recordings...
- www.americansongwriter.com
2013-04-25
★★★★★
Every alt-country fan knows the story of the Flatlanders. The band of Texans made a record at Shelby Singeleton's Plantation Records in Nashville back in 1972 called All American Music. It was only released on 8-track tape and soon faded into obscurity. As three of the central group members (Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Joe Ely, and Butch Hancock) became known as talented solo musicians, interest in the old recordings grew. Rounder Records reissued the recordings in 1992 as More a Legend Than a Band...
- www.popmatters.com
2012-09-13
★★★★★
With a powerhouse trio of talents like Butch Hancock, Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Joe Ely and all that Texas flatland culture among them, you'd think this album would soar. It do. Gilmore, with his signature singin' cowboy voice, leads off with a Utah Phillips ballad, Goin' Away. They're not here to push anything on you, just to give voice to 14 songs...
- www.hour.ca
2010-11-09
★★★★★
Untraditionalists revered in the world of traditional music, the Flatlanders act as though country-rock was invented in the summits of Tibet by a Zen guru who looks like Willie Nelson...
- www.blender.com
2010-08-22
★★★★★
The Flatlanders played precious few gigs in their early-'70s heyday, and all thoughts that live recordings existed of those honky-tonk and living-room sessions had been dismissed. But here it is—the 1972 Flatlanders, in all their glory, plus musical saw-player Steve Wesson, playing extraterrestrial honky-tonk before a couple of dozen souls at Austin's legendary One Knite club...
- www.uncut.co.uk
2010-06-19
★★★★★
No text for this review; see http://robertchristgau.com/xg/bk-cg90/grades-90s.php.
- www.robertchristgau.com
2010-06-11
★★★★★
Technically speaking, the Flatlanders' millennial reboot, 2002's bonhomous Now Again, constitutes Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Joe Ely, and Butch Hancock's sophomore slump. After all, the three musketeers' original sessions from 1971 and 1972, bronzed for posterity decades later by Rounder Records' More a Legend Than a Band, produced West Texas mysticism more a secret handshake than a music legend, yet still a Lone Star singer-songwriter standard...
- www.austinchronicle.com
2009-07-21
★★★★★
living in the moment gets old ("Going Away," "Now It's Now Again")
- www.robertchristgau.com
2009-07-10
★★★★★
In 1972, Joe Ely, Butch Hancock, and leader Jimmie Dale Gilmore--drumless psychedelic cowboys returned to Lubbock from Europe and San Francisco and Austin--recorded in Nashville for Shelby Singleton, and even an eccentric like the owner of the Sun catalogue and "Harper Valley P.T.A." must have considered them weird...
- www.robertchristgau.com
2009-07-10