Dylan Golden Aycock 
While keeping a keen eye on the Scissor Tail tiller, Dylan Golden Aycock has long had his own engrossing catalog. The last few years have found Aycock alongside Joshua Massad, working in a more Eastern raag direction, but he heads back to solo territory for a new release split between Feeding Tube and Worried Songs. The new record still slips into the fingerpicked forms that have haunted Aycock’s world for years, but it’s not the dominant strain this time around. The record is a reflection on childhood — latchkey summers spent wandering the parched pavement until the sun slips low on the hills. The excitement of youth gives way to the pangs of nostalgia and that longing is captured here on No New Summers.
The instrumentation gets a wider lens, with bowed bass sparring with field recordings and nebulous tones on “Buoyant.” The track is mournful as whale song, a diving bell full of ache and spiritual longing. As the record wanders further on, the sighs are saturated with pedal steel, shuffling rhythms, and more plaintive guitar phrases that push aside the dust of his more trad folk material. The ambient country craving of “Good Directions” brings to mind kindred spirit Bobby Lee, before the pedal steel centered tracks cement his status among slow-motion country crowd. The title track sends the listener away on the winds, grasping for the past, but knowing that it’s only shadows that can never be caught. Twelve years in the making, Aycock’s latest was well worth the wait.