There's an interesting phenomenon going on in music, where the youth of today are maintaining footholds in genres that were once considered far too disparate to attract the same fanbase, much less artists. Hank III comes quickest to mind, with his Damn Band/Assjack incarnations, but Austin Lucas deserves an equal amount of notoriety. His father Bob Lucas is a player of some renown in the bluegrass scene, and while Austin most often performs acoustically, he performs semi-regularly with Czech Republic/Oregon grind franchise Guided Cradle. No one with working ears would confuse the two, but the level of quality exuded in both units is conspicuous.
Austin has been performing these dates with the vocal help of Christina Wagner and multi-instrumentalist Brad Garrett. They were not the first acoustic franchise visit to Bar Nine, nor even the first acoustic act to play Bar Nine that night, but feedback proved to be a big issue for the early part of the set, prompting the trio to unplug and decamp to the floor after the first song. This was a good idea in theory, save for the fact that there was no PA and a decent size drinking (and talking) crowd, prompting a Jason Anderson-esque audience gather-around that was a little closer than I bargained for. No one else labored under such issues, save for a drunk dude who wanted to hear some Stones, and Austin was in his usual good voice, playing a couple new tunes along with a handful of old favorites and a cover of Give My Love To Rose. Wagner was a formidable vocal foil, with a decent voice and good range in addition to being somewhat easy on the eyes. I don't believe she has anything out, but she and Austin were selling a joint tour demo CD-R set to get label attention. She deserves it and I believe might be playing solo opening sets at some of the shows. Here's
her Myspace. I'll get a review of the demos up in a bit. Austin has a new comp of his vinyl stuff out that you need called
Collection on Suburban Home. You can get that
here. While you're at it, stay up to date with all things Austin and Lucas
here.
R
As you may have gleaned from a previous post, Ms. Wagner was both a tour and bandmate of Austin Lucas on his most recent batch of dates. She and Austin were selling a tour cd package with both of the demos on separate cd-rs for the econo price of $10, so I snapped one up. I had missed both of her opening slots on the AL dates, but was pretty impressed with her pipes and plucking with Brad and Austin. And of course, I had to have the new AL demos, so it was a win for Team Wagner from the jump.
