The American folk rock band Copper & Gin consists of guitarist and vocalist Dejon Hamann, drummer Rick Poy, bassist Justin Sircus, lead guitarist Zach Siegel and keyboard player Steve Stempien. They play that sort of dirty blues inspired rock of the kind one often finds playing in seedy clubs at the dark ends of streets. Maybe they get a cut of the door and maybe they don’t. At best they get a few drink tickets. If you don’t know what I’m talking about here, you really should get out more. But for the sake of that I’d say they sound like what Ryan Adams and his band the Cardinals were doing back when they were still releasing records together. To put it plainly its rock n’ roll with lyrics that skirt the depths of battered love and finding yourself at the bottom of a bottle too often to even want to admit it because it has gotten past the point of sounding cool.
Their eponymous seven-song debut is chock full of songs like I’ve just described, covering those people whose lives are in the crapper but they’re little fish in a big pond and where they live it’s either expected to see people of these kind or they just become invisible, like the same scenery you see everyday of a routine life. On the first song, the melodious and boozy rocker “Things I'll Never Know” singer Dejon Hamann name drops being at a Blitzen Trapper show and then goes on to detail some moments of the evening which he does in a rather poetic fashion, not overdoing anything and trying for overused metaphors and I really dug this about the song. The rest of the band provides a rhythmic accompaniment that is just plain old good listening and lets listeners know up front that they know their stuff. The same could be said for the slower but still just as powerful “Jacksonville” which reminded me of the sweet sweet power of some gold old southern rock music. I could say the same for the equally heart-wrenching “Tallman.” Copper & Gin do a damn good job of playing southern tinged blues rock, especially for a band so far north of the Maison & Dixon line. I could see fans of country digging on this record just as I could see fans of the old days of classic rock. If you’re not a fan of either but are a musician of any rock-addled genre I’d say it’d do you well to take a listen to these guys. It shows what a band of tight musicians who practice their craft can do.
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