AT LAST!
Ticket details to follow soon.
Hey, what a couple of years, eh? Just a note to say we're still here. In fact, we've been cooking up the next album's worth of ditties for possible recording this spring. We hope you made it through the craziness and look forward to celebrating life and music in person with you sometime soon. We swear that day will be coming soon.
EDIT: the writing is coming along quite nicely. We look forward to something to share sometime next fall 2023 or winter at latest along with some live dates. Stay safe and see you soon.
Crikey. How do you misplace a whole year? We managed to find a way. When we recorded our new record, The Wait, grand plans were hatched to hit the road in 2020 and play to new audiences, old audience, new old audiences, old new audiences, etc. We'd play our new tracks and sell our new vinyl. It would be glorious! A year later, we find ourselves with quite a few records in boxes – and – haven't played a note together as a band all year other than sharing tracks back and forth. Worst of all, we didn't get to hang out on the tourbus with our friends, the Lazaretto Brothers. But hope springs eternal...and with light at the end of the COVID tunnel, we see potential 2021 gigs as a reality.
THE COVID SESSIONS
In the meantime, we've been collecting the works of Gus and Giuseppe Lazaretto all pandemic long. Early in the quarantine, they started sending us new cover songs and videos. We ignored 'em the best we could at first, until there were just too many to ignore. We didn't know what to do with them other than slap 'em up on YouTube and Facebook. As you may or may not know, we're not the best self-promoters, let alone friends from the old country. But nearly a year to the day, we get a box in the mail with some cassette tapes of all the songs they'd recorded all year long, and not so surprisingly, they were all pretty good. So we offered to share 'em with whomever might happen upon our site. This sounded mighty good to the brothers, so here they are.
THE DOWNLOADSAt the link you'll find nineteen individual tracks of varying quality and recording value, but all with a little something we thought worthy of sharing to the world. We packaged 'em up in a couple different ways. That's the "album cover" on the left which you'll find among the downloads (in case they didn't encode properly and you're anal like we are about having artwork with our audio files). Not sure which brother is represented here, as they look strikingly similar. Very hairy. Anyhow, the brothers thank you. We thank you. And hope to see you live and in person real soon.
If you don't know the Lazaretto Brothers, you haven't been watching the COVID Sessions. If you haven't been watching the COVID Sessions, you've been missing out on some of the best homegrown entertainment this side of quarantine. If you have, you know Gus and Giuseppe have been cooking up their own take on classic tunes all years long. Songs like the slowed down, sultry version of Loverboy's Everybody's Working for the Weekend or AC/DC's You Shook Me all Night Long next to Pearl Jam, Echo and the Bunnymen and more.
But what you might not is that the brothers play every song live, without overdubs? It's true. No lip-syncs in these videos. Every song has one of the brothers playing and singing straight-through. And the astute viewer will notice that as the series progressed, Gus and Giuseppe began accompanying themselves on other instruments or harmonies with the rule that it had to be a complete take. By all accounts, this meant that one song could end up taking hours due to this arcane, self-imposed approach.
We met the Lazaretto Brothers on Recliner's western swing through Little Portugal a few years back and have been keeping tabs on them ever since. Being from the old country, the brothers certainly knew their way around a tune, but it became clear that social media, marketing and general hygiene were not their thing. So we decided to take them under our wings and post their stuff while we all sheltered home during the pandemic.We suggest you check them all out. What else do you have to do?