Are you looking to get shipwrecked after the game on Saturday? If so, come sail away with New Madrid’s Yardboat at Proud Larrys’.
Having recorded and independently released their full length debut, Yardboat, this group of boys has stuck together and starved together; Yardboat is their journey. The music drifts softly through a star filled, dreamy space, but still feels very much alive. Each song grows around gentle strokes of rusty guitar, adopted from ancestors, then re-finely tuned and twisted into rampages of orchestrated galactic madness, before the build soon blasts off into unmarked territory of the fathers before them.
New Madrid brings a sense of oneness and easily carries five generations of musical heritage across their backs, both before and ahead of their time. As a relatively new band on the flourishing scene of Athens, Georgia, they have already blazed trials of their own, long-haired and barefooted, across the Tennessee mountains and into the heart of Georgia. It’s no surprise that the overall structure of the album is best compared to the Tennessee mountains, where New Madrid calls home. From dark sunken valleys of brown whiskey sorrows, upon the rocky up-climb of the curious nomad, who beautifully soars over the peak, reaching deep into clouds of sonic reverb, then down into the trough to do it all over again. Soulful woes of the arrival of Fall and the death of everything along the way, the feared joy and hidden pleasures of solitude, and remarks of a black sunrise in the distance.
New Madrid respects, but disregards the conventions and trends of the musical influences they hold dear, and they do it well. I think they have made it where they were going, as the album ends with giving thanks to the juniper trees, for their shape and beauty. From the outcome of what they have created, their view is just fine and you should come be a part of it, Saturday, September 7th at Proud Larrys’. Let’s start a drunken square dancing mosh pit.
