Jarred Brown (drums); Brandon Gonzales (bass); Big Jeff (guitar); Chad Nichols (voice).
Influences
Johnny Paycheck, Roger Miller, Ennio Morricone, The Birthday Party, The Rolling Stones, Bobby Fuller, Angelo Badalamenti, Lee Hazlewood, Waylon Jennings, The Stooges, Jim Thompson, Cormac McCarthy, Raymond Chandler, Larry McMurtry.
Sounds Like
The soundtrack to a David-Lynch-directed neo-western, composed by Ennio Morricone, arranged by Roy Orbison, sung by Iggy Pop, and played by the Rolling Stones (Mick Taylor-era).
Since their debut demo in 2000, The Transgressors have been bringing a resolutely singular breed of music to Austin, Texas' already varied and complex musical landscape. The idea for the band was born out of the mutual vision of Big Jeff Keyton (Bloody Tears, T. Tex Edwards) and Chad Nichols (Enduro), and the band's musical core lies in the blend of Keyton's reverb-drenched twang guitar and Nichols' rich baritone vocals, with vintage organ tones and mariachi-style trumpet providing occasional accents. While the Transgressors' main interest is roots music, they are not a typical Americana band. They take cues from such disparate material as post-psychedelic 60s rock, pre-British Invasion rock and roll, 80s minimalism, a variety of country styles (roots, Bakersfield, outlaw, and cosmopolitan, to name a few), and the film music of Ennio Morricone and Angelo Badalamenti. This is honky-tonk music for the dyed-hair set. Or soundtrack music for the PBR crowd. Or sometimes just plain high-octane, dragstrip rock and roll.
Where the roots influence really comes across is in the band's lyrics. The Transgressors are storytellers, and they weave haunting tales of loss, misery, and frustrated vengeance. The songs are simple, straightforward narratives that traffic in the kind of universal truths found throughout American folk music--tragedy, deceit, death--but the dynamic arrangements throw them into a kind of relief, giving them a more cinematic scope. The imagery found herein is the imagery of a lawless, gothic Texas landscape, and it brings to mind the work of such Texas authors as Jim Thompson, Cormac McCarthy, and Larry McMurtry at the same time as it conjures the stylized American West of Sergio Leone.
Hey! Thanks for writing...I guess if you live long enough and sift through enough crap, you wind up with odd combinations of things that strike a chord...I'm sure you all aren't much different...I've only been to Austin once, it was the first and only place I've ever played shuffleboard,which was a blast, especially with the amount of liquor consumed....
"In the evening they came out upon a mesa that overlooked all the country to the north. The sun to the west lay in a holocaust where there rose a steady column of small desert bats and to the north along the trembling perimeter of the world dust was blowing down the void like the smoke of distant armies. The crumpled butcherpaper mountains lay in sharp shadowfold under the long blue dusk and in the middle distance the glazed bed of a dry lake lay shimmering like the mare imbrium and herds of deer were moving north in the last of the twilight, harried over the plain by wolves who were themselves the color of the desert floor." ---Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian
the "they" he's referring to are the transgressors, right?
