The Gourds with The Preservation

@ Antone's Fri 01/27

Event Details

The Gourds play a disarmingly organic variation on alt-country, a genre that has oddly come to mean country that sounds like country used to sound. The group is still best known outside its native Texas as the band behind that (hilarious) bluegrass cover of Snoop Doggs Gin And Juice, but fans know thats but a dip in the bands deep well of droll humor and genre-mashing fun. The 2007 disc Noble Creatures didnt muck with a winning formula, once again combining twanged-up roots-rock, zydeco, and disarmingly funny lyrics to make rollicking barnstormers such as Cranky Mulatto. The band's 2009 album Haymaker! features more of the same. While songwriters Kevin Russell and Jimmy Smith have written the most dense, reference-laden country songs of the last 10 years and almost single-handedly made a place for deep thought in a genre of "Honky Tonk Badonkadonks" they have, for the most part, shied away from the tear-in-my-beer ballads that made country music a commercial powerhouse over the last 50 years.

The Preservation officially formed in November of 2009 and have proven to be an ambitious and accomplished group in the short time since. They recorded and released a demo that Winter and went on tour for 12 straight weeks in the Summer of 2010. In the Fall, they launched a fundraiser on Kickstarter.com in hopes of recording their first full length album at a level of quality they felt it deserved. In two short months they surpassed their goal of $6,000 raising over $10,000 to put toward recording costs. In February of 2011, they recorded at Public Hi-Fi in Austin, a studio built by Spoon drummer/producer Jim Eno. The album was co-produced and engineered by Brad Bell, a recent Grammy winner for his work on Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs.

Performing Artists

The Gourds

The Preservation