BR5-49 – Live from Robert’s (EP)
All kinds of ink has been spilled recently heralding this Nashville combo as a welcome return to a time when country music could be found in its rawest and purest form — and totally line-dance free. And after listening to the band’s debut, Live At Robert’s, there’s no questioning the members’ passionate reverence for the genre’s pre-rock idioms. It’s got to be passion when five guys spend four nights a week, four hours a night, playing classic country covers (and a selection of originals) for less than a twenty and tips.
Energy crackles throughout the six songs culled from one of the band’s many sets at Robert’s, a western wear store/juke-joint bar (and hence probably the only venue in which a band can announce from the stage “boots are half price until twelve o’clock”) that has been packin’ in the patrons to catch the buzzed-about BR-5. Few live recordings manage to effectively capture the vibrancy of actually being there, but this disc sets a well-recorded and exceptionally tight performance against a nicely measured level of honky-tonk din.
The original material presented here covers all stylistic bases: the backwoods cabin twang of “Hillbilly Thang”; the Bob Wills-inspired swing of “Bettie, Bettie” (as in pin-up queen Page); and a hard-core truck-driving anthem in “18 Wheels & A Crowbar”. And then there’s the song that has become a midnight staple of BR5-49’s set, a seamy, bordering-on-kitsch take on Mayberry, “Me n’ Opie (Down By The Duck Pond)”. My guess is that this song works better as a performance piece than it does as an album cut.
Since the band’s repertoire of covers probably runs into the high hundreds, it would seem a daunting task to whittle that list down to two for inclusion here. However, the band smartly plucked a couple of tracks from landmark country artists, opting for a raucous run through the Johnny Horton hit “Ole Slewfoot” (his catalog comprises a significant part of the group’s set list) and a faithful rendering of the Louvin Brothers hit “Knoxville Girl”. It don’t get much more real than that.