Drag the River have been receiving a fair amount of press lately which is always nice for a little label like mine to see. The most recent pieces of press includes a show feature in Boston Weekly and a great review on EuroPunk.net.
To start with the piece called “Drag the River, the Undiscovered Country”, I took the following excerpt:
…the Fort Collins, CO, band somehow manages to make alt-county that owes little to Uncle Tupelo. As great as Tupelo was, they always sounded a little forced, as did the hundreds of bands they influenced (Son Volt, Bonnie Prince Billy, Calexico, et al.). There’s nothing like that in Drag the River.
With shit-kickin’ strummers like the Springsteen-bombed-on-Jack Daniel’s strains of “Me & Joe Drove Out to California,” they’re a band that all three Hank Williamses and all five Ramones could pound old sodas to. But with cry-in-your-Coors ballads like “Strange,” they also appeal to sissies who dig Jeff Tweedy and Will Oldham.
The mystery is how they do it. How, how, how?
“It’s just those open guitar chords that do it,” says Drag the River singer-guitarist Jon Snodgrass. “Hüsker Dü and The Replacements always played those open guitar chords in G-major, and those are country chords in country keys. And that’s what we do. We don’t call it alt-country. We call ourselves ‘country and Midwestern’ because we grew up listening to country and Minneapolis punk. Well, that and the Beatles.”
Read the entire feature here. I love the reference to Country and MidWestern as I think I might have been one of the first to call the band C + MW. I am sure someone else called them this though. The Europunk.net review was done by a friend of Suburban Home, Ben Conoley. One excerpt I particularly like in the review is this one:
One of It’s Crazy’s strongest attributes is that it’s clear this is a band comprised of friends who want to be playing music together. Its 12 songs sound as though they were written on creaky front-porches or around camp fires, and are probably best enjoyed in such a setting.
Read the entire review here.
Suburban Home Records
virgil, i was just about to email you about that drag the river feature in the Dig. i was eating lunch in the cafeteria and stumbled upon it while reading this weeks issue. it’s a very nice full page story. congrats!