by rudyards | January 28th, 2014
The Footnotes (Houston, TX)
https://www.reverbnation.com/thefootnoteshotx
Rick Eakens founded the Footnotes in New Mexico. The group has quartered in Texas and Nashville. The Footnotes do classic American roots rock with new sounds and styles. Two longtime friends have joined Rick to continue (and refresh) the tradition. Catch them at the nearest music joint.
Rick Eakens - guitar & vocals
Allan Gill - bass & vocals
Kevin Tate - drums
Churchwood (Austin, TX)
https://www.saustexmedia.com/CHURCHWOOD.html
Churchwood performs a vital and much-needed musical mission on their self-titled Saustex Records debut album: Saving the blues from the blahs and numerous other crimes and afflictions. Hailing from Austin, Texas, a city rightfully accused of being “The Boring White Blues Capital of the World,” the ingenious quintet kick the lazy butt of blues music into the second decade of the 21st Century and beyond.
And they do so with Bohemian panache, gonzo élan, punky ‘tude, bluesy grit and stunning musical mastery and imagination while keeping a firm rock’n’roll Vulcan death grip on the roots of the blues. The result is a sound that’s rife with the beef and the heart — if you get the drift — plus mind-expanded smarts and relentlessly wild and wooly soul.
The sonic scoop on Churchwood might best be expressed by a sampling of their song titles: The French symbolist poetics meets the rock’n’roll Burundi beat of “Rimbaud Diddley,” the mojo rising to a tempest of “Vendidi Fumar” (“I Sell Smoke”), and the soaring shredded shuffle of “Supermonisticgnositiphistic.” They take a funky ride through the backwoods blues with “Pontiac Flanagan,” invite you to “Melungeon In The Dungeon,” shuffle up to the gallows on “Pity The Noose,” and open a “Can O’ Worms” that stomps, swirls and snarls. “Ulysses” takes a country-blues trot across the Grecian delta, “Abraxas” burrows way down deep, and then it all comes to a full-throttle pummeling crescendo with a “Car Crash.”
Eric Hisaw Band (Austin, TX)
https://www.reverbnation.com/erichisaw
“Eric Hisaw’s songs are little vignettes from life on the road, stories written in the moments when emotions are acute, and he marries them to tunes which lodge quickly in the brain” John Davy - Flyinshoes Review UK
“Many people including millionaire rockstars, write and sing about working class life, but Hisaw has and edge on all of them, authenticity…this is powerful stuff.” - John Conquest, 3rd Coast Music
“Eric Hisaw’s songwriting is uncorrupted and bulletproof. He’s a check you can cash at the bank of cool.” - Ray Wylie Hubbard
“with the 10 just-about-perfect tales of hard-traveled and weary-hearted workingman blues… the journeyman songwriter, guitarist and singer delivers his first stone-cold masterpiece”. Richard Skanse - Lonestar Music
“Roots rocking Americana singer / songwriter Eric Hisaw is exceptional since his debut album “Thing About Trains” (2000) among my favorites. With “Ghost Stories”, this sympathetic outlaw Texas (originally from Las Cruces, NM) on his fifth full length album that has now been clean a top 10 hit in the Euro Americana Charts misappropriated. Hisaw camp programs including works in the good company of John Hiatt, Gilian Welch, Dave Alvin, Eileen Jewell and Grayson Capps and let one thing immediately clear: go! Once again he delivers with… Chuck Berry style rocker Johnston County, California Girl, Lonely Road and Don’t Live there Anymore may indeed fully expect Hisaw’s unique telecaster…sound feast…Can we speak here of an enjoyable masterpiece…sure!” Francois Braeken - Beale Street
