Bare knuckle, bar stool smashing rock and roll. Taking the stage like Bela Lugosi on a mechanical bull, Royal Son of a Guns belt out rip snorting roadhouse acid folk blues with heavy doses of surrealism. These bar stool smashing miscreants take Americana on a psycho-cathartic hayride through the thorny nettles of the American roots music underbelly with primitive guitars, relentless rat-a-tat washboard and a bedrock of bass guitar that will rattle your teeth. Dig.

Portland songwriter Kory Quinn, a DIY contemporary hobo intellectual, has a refreshingly homespun take on Americana, a very welcome sigh of relief in today’s contemporary market. After spending over 270 Self-Booked Dates on the road, spanning 7 countries, on three Continents and another 90 plus shows already booked for early next year throughout the Good Ol’ USA, Quinn still finds time to write and record new material. The just released second full-length album, At The End of The Bar, boils down red-dirt basics in a freewheeling roadhouse stew. Quinn’s songwriting is adroit and surefooted, offering sturdily constructed country, folk, and Cajun-tinged songs for his ensemble to really sink their fangs into on this instant jukebox classic. The songs are short and sweet but packed with clever lines, sentimental harmonies and twangy fills. All that makes them the kind of songs that hang around your brain like honky-tonk regulars. Between road-worn self-penned material, old-time drinking songs and heart rending country standards The Mighty Quinn is the next one to watch out for.

Ted Stevens and The Third Rail are a band defined by their songs, at once both fresh and familiar, classic rock sounds underpinned by a modern Indie sensibility. As the name implies, The Third Rail are an electrified band full of loud heavy guitars and boisterous top-of-your-lungs vocals. Inspired and energized by the hard rock on the late 1960’s and the song oriented FM rock of the early 1970’s, their music is rife with hard edged guitars, heavy drums, and power pop hooks.
After spending four years in Glasgow, Scotland as a performance artist, Stevens returned to his hometown of Louisville, Kentucky in the summer of 2011 and released an album of material for sonaBlast! Records entitled “Waiting.” Shortly thereafter the band that would become The Third Rail was formed, featuring the artful and melodic bass of Kirk Kiefer, and the aggressive, dramatic drumming of Tony Gantt.

The band began to craft the songs for their upcoming album, “Music for Cars,” last fall. Written by Stevens, they bear little to no resemblance to those on “Waiting”; gone are that album’s layered synthesizers and stacked background singers, replaced with simple three piece rock and roll arrangements. The band set out to lay down as much as possible live in the studio, working without the restrictions of headphones or click tracks and recording to a vintage analog tape machine. All overdubs were performed by the three band members themselves in order to keep the sonic identity of the record cohesive. The material teems with themes of youth, vitality, excitement, and conversely, the anger and frustration of that youth, along with the desire to take control of life. The characters in the songs struggle with the places they grew up in and how to live a life with consequences. Beneath the drama of the lyrics lay hard rocking, barn burning, tracks rife with musical hooks.

A perfect introduction to The Third Rail and their dedication to the traditions of good rock and roll is the new single “Live Forever” mixed by veteran Austin, TX producer Mike McCarthy (Spoon, Fastball, Patti Griffin, Heartless Bastards, And You Will Know Us By the Trail of The Dead). Having spent the last year honing their live act at festivals and opening for bands such as What’s Made Milwaukee Famous, Nerves Junior, Stephaniesid, Mobley, and Josh Krajcik, as well as receiving extensive college radio airplay for the songs on “Waiting”, the band is now spending the majority of its time on the road playing around the midwest bringing their dramatic high energy show to new audiences and preparing to unleash their new music.