Turchi Keeps Their Past Alive
Growing up in the shadow of the Great Smoky Mountains, you’d think that bluegrass music would have seeped into your pores. But Asheville’s Turchi ain’t about that. The band calls its sound kudzu boogie, mixing hill country fuzz and swampy hoodoo fonk, blending Dr. John, the North Mississippi Allstars and R.L Burnside. “I think all over the place is a pretty fair description,” frontman/guitarist Reed Turchi says.
Their latest, Can’t Bury Your Past, was recorded in Memphis, but has an overall Mississippi hill country feel. “Take Me Back Home” sounds like ZZ Top fuzz strangled by kudzu but managing to let a few lysergic acid licks leach through, “Burning In Your Eyes” boasts a Dr. John hoodoo fonk vocal over a swampy, psychedelic Tony Joe White style guitar with a honkin’ bari undertow.
Turchi carves out a deep, dark black hole of despair on ”Of Brother’s Blood,” a haunting, shimmery, North Mississippi-flavored pondering on the death of a brother and what lies beyond the grave.“We all gotta die someday,” Turchi repeats over his droning guitar line.
The band doles out some swampy, spoken-word revenge on “Your Ex, He’s Next,” an ominous ode about a good friend stabbing in him the back, a deed he intends to rectify with a baseball bat upside the head.
“We’ve been pushing to get it a little swampier and murkier and groovier,” Turchi says of the sound he got adding JJ Grey and Mofro members saxophonist Art Edmaiston and keyboardist Anthony Farrell to his core trio with bassist Andrew Hamlet and drummer Cameron Weeks.
But some of the band’s stuff comes in a hard shell boogie case, like “Sawzall,” a hill country drone underscored by Farrells’ Memphis choogling, Booker T-style burbling organ overlaid with Turchi’s raspy musings on a guy who wants to cut his house in half with a Sawzall to give to his soon be ex-wife.
Turchi has racked up an impressive discography, putting out three full length releases and an EP in just two years. The Allstars’ Luther Dickinson played on three songs on the band’s ’12 debut, Road Ends in Water, with Mendoza Line’s John Troutman on pedal steel recruited for ’13’s Live In Lafayette.
Although styles and subjects vary slightly, Turchi wants to keep his band’s output a continuous story. “That amuses me,” he says, and a growing number of fans agree.
Grant Britt