Take two seasoned session musicians who have played with everyone from Gene Clark to The Band to Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers to Bonnie Raitt, Shakey Jake Harris, and Neil Young and Crazy Horse. Add a young drummer with a deft touch and a young singer/songwriter with a literary bent and a musical vision that is at once deeply traditional and intensely personal. Here you have the multi-generational makings of the Kerosene Kondors.
The Kondors came together in the wilds of Northern California’s Mendocino County, outside of the big-city music scene where ambitious bands battle it out for national recognition, in a small town where guitar gods in their fifties rub shoulders at the local bar with young talent, and powerful musical relationships form outside of concerns of scene and prestige, industry and image. The rural rock scene is the underground to the underground.
The songs on this, their third album, grew from the vast, rich, blood-drenched, spirit-haunted, loamy black soil of American music. Frontman Will Stenberg attempts to write songs so great they will force open the doors to what Leonard Cohen called “The Tower of Song,” and rank with the greatest. Battle-scarred rock ‘n roll veterans Buddy Stubbs and Jon Faurot embellish these songs with playing that is full of ragged glory, sneaky, subtle nuance, and what Charlie Patton called “solid power.” Jubal Stedman plays like a young Levon Helm. Other contributing players add indispensable texture and life.
Together this group has created a sixteen-song epic that spans the gamut from frantic, nervous rockabilly to pirate sing-a-longs to Southern-fried funk to what can only be described as “apocalyptic Motown folk.” Sixteen Seasons is an underground classic.
The album is here: http://www.willstenberg.com/albums/sixteenseasons
and here: http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/kerosenekondorsmusic
and my own webpage, here: http://www.willstenberg.com
