THE LONESOME HEROES: Press

The Lonesome Heroes

Don't Play to Lose (Floodwater)

Balancing on the slide of Landry McMeans' lap steel, the Lonesome Heroes' sad and forlorn country cry walks the dirt road from West Texas desert to a poor man's urban dwelling. Singer Rich Russell's Brooklyn upbringing marries Willie Nelson to Will Oldham on the Heroes' debut EP, and when McMeans' delicately airy voice opens up "Oyster," tears roll.

Austin "New Age country" duo the Lonesome Heroes have so many gigs, "We're still really just figuring out what we're doing, and it stems from playing so much," says Brooklyn-born Rich Russell. Navigating country, folk, indie rock, and Daniel Lanois arcana, Russell and San Marcos native Landry McMeans, who alternate Dobro and acoustic guitar and lately have been borrowing the Weary Boys' rhythm section, met two years ago at the Austin Music Co-op. "Living there made us realize how hard you have to work to be a musician," says McMeans. The Heroes weren't sure where they fit in locally until hearing Li'l Cap'n Travis on KUT's LiveSet. "I was like, 'We're going to the Continental Club tomorrow!'" Russell says. After 2006 EP Don't Play to Lose on St. Paul, Minn.'s Floodwater Records (an LP recorded live at Flipnotics is due soon), things picked up when the Heroes began hosting Headhunters' popular Wednesday alt.country night, where they've welcomed American Graveyard, the Texas Sapphires, Brennen Leigh, Gary Newcomb Trio, Boxcar Preachers, and the Breathers. "Headhunters likes it because it's mellow, a nice change from the rest of the week," says Russell. The Heroes play Mean-Eyed Cat, 7pm tonight (Thursday), before a brief trip back East and several gigs during South by Southwest weekend.

A sixteen minute psychedelic steel trip. The eerie, liquid noise that Landry McMeans pulls from her lap steel and dobro is the defining sound on this five track EP. It’s a desert sound, reminiscent of what the late great Rainer Ptacek might have produced if he’d taken a little more peyote. Smooth and multicoloured, like oil in a rock pool, it alternately leads the songs and slides in behind them, always there, always nibbling away at the psyche.

I normally stick to reviewing full size albums, but this band shows great promise in their 5-song debut. Chemistry between players is so important in any music project, and thats what I hear in this. The vocal harmonies between Rich Russell and Landry Slydry McMeans seem like a rare thing in its infancy, and so does the songwriting. Slydrys high-pitched voice is as unique as her slide on the lap steel guitar. The Lonesome Heroes are on a mission to make a different kind of country music. With its Grapes of Wrath era feel soaked in reverb, you get the feeling you are listening to a long distant echo of something that once was. The drifting melancholy and bittersweet style is beyond the range of their youth, and yet it seems totally natural to them.The production is low budget and the mix is occasionally questionable. The song structure is loose but the almighty groove and ability to convey the mood is dead on. I expect great things from this band in the future, so theyd better stick around for the long haul.

You may or may not have heard of the movie School of Rock, starring the so-called "Jack Black," scare quotes very much intended for the name is as obviously spurious as Costanza's legendary porno moniker, "Buck Naked." In S/O/R, the main character, played by Mr. Black, sketches out what purports to be the entire history of rock and roll on a blackboard, for the edification of schoolchildren. Implausible as it sounds, his history is fair, intelligent, and mostly complete, but there's at least one noteworthy genre that fails to get its chalky due, and that is the one variously referred to as Cosmic American, Space Country, and Psycountry (for Psychedelic Country) and whose most perfect exemplar is probably David Crosby's 1971 "If I Could Only Remember My Name." It's a niche with strong Austin roots, from the 13th Floor Elevators through the Cosmic Cowboys of the '70s to current AustinSound.net (or, at least, B.D. Fischer) faves Lomita. Space country (my favored term) relies on the surprising sonic similarity between the slide guitar of traditional country and the various effects and distortions of traditional psychedelia … if that term makes sense, talking now about progenitors like the Jefferson Airplane, Pink Floyd, and Ziggy Stardust all the way through My Bloody Valentine, the various incarnations of Dean Wareham, The Verve, Halley, Explosions in the Sky, etc. etc. That similarity itself reflects a mutual thematic focus on isolation and loneliness, from the outlaw Cosmic Cowboys fighting one-man wars against the Nashville machine to Major Tom drifting into space by himself, sending his best wishes back to his wife.

This, of course, is right where The Lonesome Heroes' debut EP Don't Play to Lose fits in, with echo-chamber vocals and plenty of sliding steel and spacey distortion. Track one, the title track, opens in spiritual lockstep with "Happy Trails," a guitar like a lazy-walking horse laid over what sounds like synthesized laser blasts ala Han Solo distended over several measures. The subject matter is likewise a perfect blend of indie space rock and classic country, the abstract neurotic and the concrete pathetic: "And those thoughts inside your mind / they're all leading you astray / your hands they shake / just like a wet dog / that's been left out in the rain." Soon after that one Miss Landry "Slydry" McMeans (she's just one of the band members with a name so a propos that is difficult to believe it is not invented; the other is Sarah Millenary on the fiddle) joins frontman Rich Russell on the vocals, and she (and this is a good thing) sounds a lot like Mazzy Star's Hope Sandoval (Russell sounds a little like a more urbane Woody Guthrie), and the space country mélange—instrumental, thematic, vocal—is complete.

The formula works with continued success on the remaining four tracks. The country instrumentals and space rock production are a classic case of opposites attracting. The lyrics delightfully blend the conventions of both genres, as again on track four, "Halos Above Our Heads": "The rain, it gathers in the mountains / and the rivers flow down into the valley / … / as the sun shines high / in this harsh urban sky / while we wait for a message / from up above / so shine you high / Mister Sun-in-the-Sky / let those clouds form halos above our heads." It is hard to imagine the Space Country sound through description alone, for you certainly don't hear it on the radio or even very often on the indie scene. But when you do, and it's done as perfectly as it is on this EP, it registers to the bone. It would be hard to find a more perfect exemplar of this crazy coupling that turns out not to be so crazy than this band.

The Lonesome Heroes play regularly at Headhunters, having started the weekly "alt. country" showcase on Wednesday nights. The five tracks on Don't Play to Lose come in at 16:53.

- B.D. Fischer

Sleepy, weepy, cowpunk from the Austin duo of Rich Russell and Landry McMeans, whose lap steel and dobro drags these alt.country twisted tales through the barren Texas desert with a faint Neil Young aroma wafting through the sagebrush and mixing with Chicago cultists, Souled American. Steel sashays across the horizon, leaving a dusty aftertaste of Jonathan Richmans attempts at going country in our ears (cf. Jonathan Goes Country). McMeans takes center stage on The Moon and The Sun, and her vocals leave a sweet, honeysuckle variety to Russells good ol boy, downhome grooves. Russells echoed lap steep and dobro add a haunting, full-moon quality to the track that contrasts nicely with our heroines litling voice.The duo end on a high note with the spooky, Oyster, with McMeans faraway vocals riding the dusty prairie winds across your mind on a magic carpet ride buttressed by her lap steel and dobro. This is the perfect soundtrack for hunkering down in a sleeping bag under the stars somewhere out in the wild expanses of Americas vast hinterlands, counting shooting stars and cowering from coyotes howling in the night.
- Jeff Penczak

The debut EP from country folk group The Lonesome Heroes are bar tales that are elbow to elbow with some of the legendary lyrics spun by the best in the country world. Salty vocals with numerous harmony parts soar into a high ledge of abandoned folk guitar and twangy hollow body guitar swagger. With psychedelic underpinnings, Dont Play to Lose is a tasty morsel of modern country folk that was extraordinarily produced and engineered by Scott OGara. Perfect.
J-Sin

If Maryrose Crook and the Renderers are the jaded souls playing to the barflies as closing time looms, then The Lonesome Heroes are the still-hopeful opening act. The haunting lap steel belies that hope, however, lurking beneath strummed guitars with a lonely yearning. In the title track, Rich Russell declares, "country songs ... have got a strange hold over me." With their roots firmly planted in Hank Williams territory, The Lonesome Heroes structure their songs well, blazing their own path through alt-country style.