OCMS opened here at the club for Robert Earl Keen back in 2001. IMHO they are one of the best Bluegrass outfits around. They have been a staple on many of the Bluegrass festivals up and down the east coast for the past couple of years and have honed there craft amazingly. They have recently been pushed to the forefront of the alt-country scene in no small part because David Rawlings produced their recent album.
From the Old Crow site:
Once they'd attracted the interest of Nettwerk America , the label that launched the career of Coldplay and is home to Neil Finn and The Be Good Tanyas, O.C.M.S. was more than ready to go; for a year they had been working in the studio with a producer similarly energized by the arcane but vital influences of pre-War music. David Rawlings, duet partner of New Folk standard-bearer Gillian Welch, led the quintet into two of Nashville 's most stories studios ?? RCA's legendary Studio B (good to Elvis, Waylon, Dolly and more) and Woodland Sound Studios, where Will The Circle Be Unbroken had been made in 1972. The resulting self-titled album shares with that influential Circle album (and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band that masterminded it) a wide range of traditional country and blues songs, from the reeling mountain party sound of ??Tear It Down? and ??Hard To Love? to the juggy stomp of ??Tell It to Me? and the mournful Leadbelly-inspired version of ??CC Rider.?
It was inevitable with such provocative source material, O.C.M.S. would begin writing songs, and the new album features half a dozen by three of the band's members. Critter Fuqua's ??Big Time In The Jungle? is an arresting Vietnam War story song (and a true one) that could have come off an overlooked vinyl classic from 1969. ??Trials & Troubles? by fiddler/singer Ketch Secor and guitarist/singer Willie Watson is a lyrical stepson of Woody Guthrie, while the chorus' close harmonies evoke the Blue Sky Boys. Watson's remarkably timeless voice also fronts ??We're All In This Together,? while Secor's swaying ??Wagon Wheel? rounds out the album. Both feature three-part harmonies that feel surprisingly like the country material of Neil Young and the Grateful Dead. Throughout, Kevin Hayes lays down an unmistakably original rhythm voice on his 1920s period guitjo, wile Morgan Jahnig's upright bass binds and organized the band's sound from below.
O.C.M.S. members have no illusions that they're rediscovering the music of the pre-War era; many of the songs they hold dear aren't being released for the first time but being reissued for the umpteenth time. But by reinterpreting and reintroducing this canonical American music to new generations, they're feeding a deep cultural hunger. Old Crow's assets go far deeper than the songs themselves. It's an unbridled spirit, played live and loud across the nation, in a voice that's entirely their own.
