Yard Sale

Yard Sale

SUN Nov 8th

Doors 6pm | Show 7pm

YARD SALE

Irreverent, authentic, and deceptively complex: no one here is trying too hard to be pure. The Hudson Valley based acoustic quartet Yard Sale plays a ramshackle, hip, and politically potent Americana music, equally in love with Ernest Tubb and with Sam Cooke. Yard Sale’s debut full-length Every Day moves from backwoods holler-alongs and heartbreakers (“Dog Gone Shame,” “Bastard”) to art-folk gems (“Every Day”) to topical and progressive new-folk (“Media,”), and a variety of groove songs that reveal the band’s abiding love of gospel and old soul. Like the best folk and soul, Every Day speaks unironically of troubled times and of the evergreen power of music to transmit the grit of real experience.

Roots experimentalists in the tradition of the Band, Neil Young, Dr. Dog, and The Avett Brothers, Yard Sale’s fluent playing and roughhewn, uncorrected vocal virtuosity often transcends folk, approaching the sophistication of casual chamber music, but always in the service of sturdy, eccentric and emotionally stirring songs. Like the best of today’s smart indie Americana artists (including some of their Team Love Records label mates), Yard Sales plays freely with American myth, haunted spirits, and weird old styles but
does so in a way that is less studied, less groomed, and more stylistically inclusive than many of their steadfastly retro peers.

Yard Sale is so named because they got their start playing on the back of a pickup truck at yard sales and taking a cut in exchange for the buyers they attracted, a habit that led to them eventually auctioning off their own possessions at club gigs until they ran out of stuff to sell. Playing progressive, multi-singer Americana and soul in New York’s mid-Hudson valley (Kingston, Woodstock), Yard Sale draws inevitable comparisons to home-region heroes Levon Helm and the Band. Like The Band, Yard Sale features one transplanted southerner in South Carolinian Taylor Davis (banjo/drums), a few native Canadians in Charlie Schikowitz (mandolin/fiddle) and Theo Schikowitz (upright bass), as well as one native New Yorker in Rick Birmingham (guitar/fiddle).

Mixed by Bill Reynolds (formerly of Band of Horses) at Fleetwood Shack recordings in Nashville, Every Day is released on Team Love Records, the boutique Americana and indie rock label co-founded by Connor Oberst And Nathaniel Krenkel in the early 2000s and headquartered in Yard Sale’s home base of New Paltz, New York. With banjo, violin, mandolin, upright bass, and guitar, Yard Sale weaves intricate textures over swinging, stomping, funky, waltzing, and stumbling grooves. Their distinctive call-and-response vocals split the difference between chorale and the baying of dogs—dangerous and wild but profoundly musical and rooted.

https://iloveyardsale.com/