Crooked Still with special guests Joy Kills Sorrow

Start: 10/31/2008 - 8:00pm

Crooked StillFans of Crooked Still who came to their stunning sold out Cedar show in Mar 2007 or one of their insanely popular shows at Winnipeg Folk Festival over the past two years will notice a change: cellist Rushad Eggleston left the group in November of 2007. The group has now become five with the addition of fiddler Brittany Haas and Tristan Clarridge on cello and second fiddle. Lead vocalist Aoife O’Donovan told No Depression magazine, “When you’re in a quartet, and one of your members who’s been a huge creative part of your sound decides to leave, it definitely crosses your mind to just not do it. But we had spent five years building a name for ourselves. And if you look at almost every band that’s successful, there’s been line-up changes.” If Still Crooked, the first album from the new line-up, is any indication, success for this young band will be explosive. Crooked Still continues to perform one of the most compelling forms of alternative bluegrass and string band music today.

With Haas and Clarridge, the band has proven themselves to be even more adventurous, breathing their cosmic fire into old songs. “When Rushad left, we wanted to move in new directions,” O’Donovan says. “Brittney adds another female presence to the band; I can hear my voice in her fiddling. Tristan has a refined cello tone, with a powerful, restrained energy. They bring a fresh outlook to the arrangements that keeps the music exciting.” For the new album, everyone brought material for consideration. “As we worked on the songs, we realized there was a lot of loss and mortality in the lyrics,” banjo player Greg Liszt adds. “You can’t make a folk album without delving into what’s happening now and we were surprised at how current the songs sounded. On ‘Captain, Captain’ a woman asks what happened to her lover and the Captain replies ‘he dropped down dead in the gulf.’ It’s a 400-year-old line, but it gives you chills.” Still Crooked is an ensemble effort of inspired music making that moves the bands’ impossible to pigeonhole style in new directions while honoring their folk roots. “It’s hard to pin down our music,” bass player Corey DiMario says. “We play improvised old time music, bluegrass, folk and our own songs within the broad context of a string band. Like a lot of today’s bands, we have modern and traditional influences that confuse the boundaries. We want to keep blurring those lines to make something all our own.”

Crooked Still’s genre-bending sound is the combination of five distinctive talents who are not content to limit themselves to any one project or style of music. Together, they have uncovered new facets of brilliance on Still Crooked. The genesis of the group continues to evolve. Much like moonshine distilled in the apparatus that inspired their name, Crooked Still is still fermenting. And the music on Still Crooked is undeniably intoxicating. Come sample the new brew on this special Halloween show, if you dare! As if that were not enough, the addition of Joy Kills Sorrow to the line-up turns this into a, well, killer night.

"Maybe the most cohesive of the Boston dark-folk/bluegrass band's three excellent albums - chilling and otherworldly, what fantasy writers like to call 'eldritch.'" - Ken Barnes, USA Today (on Still Croooked)

"There 's no wasted energy here, no random notes played, and the only surprise is how beautifully it comes off." - Grant Alden, No Depression (on Still Crooked)