Event

THE SACRED SHAKERS

Thursday 1/24
THE SACRED SHAKERS
$15 advance / $15 at the door
8:30 doors / 9:00 show
www.sacredshakers.com

For The Sacred Shakers, there's nothing finer than old-time, country and blues-influenced gospel music. Think Hank Williams, The Carter Family, The Stanley Brothers, Son House, and Mississippi Fred McDowell. Beginning in 2005, that music drew a small but ever-widening circle of some of Boston's finest musicians and vocalists together at the Country Gospel Brunch concert series. In short order, The Boston Globe described the group as "a local Who's Who of all-star roots musicians." On their eponymous debut, The Sacred Shakers offer new life to the gospel genre by revisiting the stripped down country and bluesy gospel material that inspires them.

"The eponymous record by the Shakers converts the ear instantly, thanks to airtight musicianship, helmed and driven by drummer and band founder Jason Beek, and a joyful commitment to a particular sound, the heave and ho of the old-time religion in the school of Mississippi Fred McDowell and the Carter Family.

It's hard to pick a favorite here, but you could do worse than the soft, gnawing sorrow of "Green Pastures", the folkie bliss-out of "Twelve Gates To The City", and the blues tickle of "John The Revelator". The Sacred Shakers make revelation sound doom-smitten and dirty all at once.

Eilen Jewell, an Idaho native and fellow Signature Sounds artist, gets a lot of the credit for the vocal sex appeal on the record. When she drawls about the sinner in "Travelin' Shoes", the delights of the afterlife are not the first to come to mind. That's one of the great things about this kind of gospel, though: Any cut that doesn't contain more vice than virtue isn't worthy of the name. The Sacred Shakers walk a fine, mortal line, and the results are wicked good, to use a Boston expression that seems particularly apt in this context. Satan, get thee behind them."
NO DEPRESSION