Posted by Victoria in Events, Live Music | 0
Friday Night: Live music with 13 to the Gallows
Friday, July 10, 2009
8:00 p.m.
FREE
We’re excited to have back 13 to the Gallows this Friday! One of our favorites and currently at No. 3 on the ReverbNation Country charts for Arizona, 13 to the Gallows are a compelling sound on the Valley circuit.
Maybe part Johnny Cash, part Dale Hawkins, with a Whiskeytown twist and spiked with barbed wire, 13 to the Gallows defy easy categorizations like “country,” “alt-country,” and “Americana.”
You’ll hear strains of classic country and vintage juke-joint in their music, and similarities to the neo-rockabilly of The Smokin’ 45s. But in lead vocalist Branden Pyle’s voice, there’s also the very un-country haze-suffused breathiness of Colin Devlin, the smoke-rattled growl of Davíd Garza, the electronic-infused musings of Chuck Prophet.
The songwriting, far from the more forgiving emotional landscape of alt-country college darlings like Reckless Kelly and Stoney LaRue, speaks with the sense of someone older than the band’s young members look, someone aged and bruised by experience, without illusions about the outcomes of things.
This is Robert Earl Keen via Matthew Ryan — Texas guitar licks over electrified, percussive arrangements and dark, brooding lyrics, a singer aware of his own isolation, the road he’s locked in on, and the remoteness of redemption. “Who am I?,” Pyle sings, “I don’t know.”
“No direction, the road leads me,” he tells us in the song “Dusty Roads.”
In their songs, forever finding themselves on these lost roads, as they both update conventional genres and bend them, 13 to the Gallows, ultimately, capture the sound of the Southwest and the Arizona desert — dust-worn; desolate; everywhere, stretching for miles, and following you in the rearview mirror, even when you think you’re headed away.
“Some Streets Lead Nowhere” is the title of Matthew Ryan’s stunning latest single, and 13 to the Gallows come back again and again to this same awareness of the rare escape, the fragile exit and the collapsing paths that loop in on themselves. “One step forward,” Pyle counts off in “Never Alone,” “a thousand steps back.”
