Apparently multi-tasking is harmful to the process of pinpointing bands to their appropriate genre. I found this out last weekend at the almost overly-affordable bluegrass festival at the Melting Point, where I arrived just in time to catch the tail-end songs of The Peachtree Station.
Anticipation for The Corduroy Road was thick like humidity, and the last time their sweet melodies graced my eardrums was about four months ago, also at The Melting Point, only then my hands were full trying to film a Listen Up Local episode with a Nokia N95 smart phone while simultaneously jotting down notes to cover their new EP release party.
My efforts didn’t do them justice. I slipped up somewhere along the way– primarily by reducing the band to simple bluegrass when in reality, they are the result of the genre’s creative tweaking.
The woman sitting next to me dubbed herself a Peachtree Station roadie, hardly missing a show and able to articulate the logic in their harmonies and every subtle movement. Before she chased bluegrass bands around the country, her infatuation was jazz– a genre pursued by the truly impassioned. She listens to bluegrass the same way.
I told her she should stick around for The Corduroy Road because they were my favorite bluegrass band. This later gave way to how much I knew about bluegrass, and how I never contemplated a distinction between old and new world bluegrass, the traditional and contemporary trends.
The first instrument set up by The Corduroy Road was their drum set, a scarce element in the traditional “boom-chuck” bands that played that night, where most of the percussion came from a stomping foot and the musicians smacking the sides of their instruments in between strums and plucks.
They began their set with the extremity of an electric guitar. The Corduroy Road has always dabbled in the ways of rock and roll, but only to come as close to this line without actually crossing it. This time, there was no shyness about them– the guitar growled, whined and screeched out its solos, almost one per song while John Cable sputtered clusters of drum beats that all folded into an Old 97’s likeness.
The bands previous to the set lulled the audience into reclusive mesmerization, whereas The Corduroy Road was the spell that woke them out of the trance and lured people to the forefront dance floor– sober people, that is.
More talented bands followed the set, clambering up and down scale after scale, impeccable masters of their trades and probably half wizard (ahem, Mountain Heart, ahem) and never botching a note or muffling a pitch, but they left me with little to mentally chew the cud, and no melody to digest on my way home.
In this sense, they are capricious, fleeting pleasures, allowing me to enjoy their moments before quickly breaking apart songs of other bands, but The Corduroy Road capitalizes through their decadent simplicity and droll cadences (see the song, The Corduroy Road).
Rather than a gateway into traditional bluegrass, maybe this is how it was always supposed to sound.
Ok, just forget I ever said that.
