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Concert Review -The Spiegel Garden
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The Herald, Concert Review -The Spiegel Garden >>
You can take the band out of Missouri but you can't take Missouri out of the band. The Wilders's hillbilly honkytonk hoedown comes undiluted from the source, Betsie Ellis's fiddle tunes fizzling with urgency as guitar, mandolin and double bass rock the beat along in tight formation.
Their CD's only tell part of the story. You need to be in the same room to feel the immediacy, energy and sheer physicality of a music that's full of heartbreak, stoicism and, er, goat idolatry. There's more to this quartet, though, than physical presence. Phil Wade's slide guitar solos are models of poetic concision and in Ike Sheldon they have a veritable restoration man of American vernacular music.
Not only does Sheldon's deeply personal reading retrieve all the dignity and soul that's been drained from Your Cheating Heart through countless drunken singalongs, but he also makes prime, spontaneous use of the onstage piano with a faithfully in-the-sprit St Louis Blues that even the soundchecking drummer next door couldn't knock off course. An extraordinary vital performance all round from a group whose music captures the very essence or rural America.
By: Rob Adams 08/25/07
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