Album review: ‘The Sunset Canyoneers’

There’s a wholesomeness to the Sunset Canyoneers’ self-titled debut album, and I can’t quite tell if it works for or against the sun-worshipping California country music outfit. The album’s motif is purposefully and perfectly reminiscent of the Bakersfield Sound that came about in the mid-1950s, influencing a hippie country music scene that gave rise to the likes of The Byrds, Buck Owens, the Grateful Dead, and Emmylou Harris. The Bakersfield Sound took from the old honky-tonks and stole from the then-new electrified rock’n’roll to create a music style in defiant response to the clean and prim acts of the orchestral Nashville Sound (think Patsy Cline, Dolly Parton, Kenny Rogers) – which itself was a volley against the dirty, grimy noise of the rock and rollers who had suddenly infiltrated decent white folks’ ears. It was country music fighting with itself while rock enjoyed an easy and uncontested run of the airwaves.

This is where that wholesomeness works counter to the aim of the Sunset Canyoneers, as they explicitly display Bakersfield influence by incorporating honky-tonk music made with ‘lectric twangs and rattle instead of the strictly acoustic instruments that Nashville Sound musicians clung to along with their horns and violins. However, the band’s crisp choral singalongs are straight Nashville, making the album feel more like a harmonistic celebration and ode to the genre of Bakersfield Sound than something organically of it. The record never really reaches the rowdy, rutty thoughtfulness or depths of, say, Merle Haggard and the Strangers.

However, it’s fun in the way that a They Might Be Giants country excursion can be. The Sunset Canyoneers possess an infectiously chipper attitude, and their upbeat rhythms have the jolly power to get me earnestly toe-tapping. It’s an album that services a lively social mingling, but not one that you’d want to sit down with alone. It releases March 6 under the You Are The Cosmos label.

Share:

Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn

Comments are closed.

READ OUR FULL PRINT EDITION

Our Sister Publication

a word from our sponsors!

Latest Media Guide!

Where to find the Star-Revue

Instagram

How many have visited our site?

wordpress hit counter

Social Media

Most Popular

On Key

Related Posts

An ode to the bar at the edge of the world, review by Oscar Fock

It smells like harbor, I thought as I walked out to the end of the pier to which the barge now known as the Waterfront Museum was docked. Unmistakable were they, even for someone like me — maybe particularly for someone like me, who’s always lived far enough from the ocean to never get used to its sensory impressions, but

Quinn on Books: In Search of Lost Time

Review of “Countée Cullen’s Harlem Renaissance,” by Kevin Brown Review by Michael Quinn “Yet do I marvel at this curious thing: / To make a poet black, and bid him sing!” – Countée Cullen, “Yet Do I Marvel” Come Thanksgiving, thoughts naturally turn to family and the communities that shape us. Kevin Brown’s “Countée Cullen’s Harlem Renaissance” is a collection

MUSIC: Wiggly Air, by Kurt Gottschalk

Mothers of reinvention. “It’s never too late to be what you might have been,” according to writer George Eliot, who spoke from experience. Born in the UK in 1819, Mary Ann Evans found her audience using the masculine pen name in order to avoid the scrutiny of the patriarchal literati. Reinvention, of style if not self, is in the air

Film: “Union” documents SI union organizers vs. Amazon, by Dante A. Ciampaglia

Our tech-dominated society is generous with its glimpses of dystopia. But there’s something especially chilling about the captive audience meetings in the documentary Union, which screened at the New York Film Festival and is currently playing at IFC Center. Chronicling the fight of the Amazon Labor Union (ALU), led by Chris Smalls, to organize the Amazon fulfillment warehouse in Staten