Great material, great playing, a little bit more contemporary sounding than previous CDs. With a great first video, “The American Pickers”, which has the help of Dierks Bentley on vocals and guitar and Mike Wolfe ,from the show, the video is their best. Kristin Scott Benson makes her vocal debut as a Grascal on this CD. The song “Are You Up For Getting down Tonight ?” is a slow ballad, that has a real acoustic pop sound to it, with no banjo, has a killer melody ,sticks in your head, the singing is exquisite. Smitty does some great slap bass playing on a couple of songs.
Another great slow ballad is “Bluegrass Melodies” with the emphasis on the singing. Kristin holds back on the banjo on a few songs. By that I mean she plays with constraint, not that she isn’t playing. Jamie can nail a slow ballad like the country sounding “When Your Rock Turns To Stone”, also, beautiful pedal steel on this track , no credits for Steel on CD. On the other hand, El has the Twangy, gritty type of vocal which is great for the upbeat bluegrass sound, or old time country song.
Back to bluegrass, “Roll On Big Mama” is an upbeat ,driving song ,with some hot banjo picking by Kristen. “Headin’ South” is a great up tempo song sang by El, with Danny playing great mandolin and Kristin playing a nice short banjo lead on the song. Their vocals have never sounded better, than here. There are are drums used on some of the songs, and piano too. BTW, Jeremy Abshire plays some of the best fiddle that He ever has thru out the album. It will be a shame to see him go after his six years with the group, He plays with a certain style that has a lot of nice long bow strokes or he can flat out go crazy and play something like “The Devil went Down to Georgia.” They did a CD called “Grascals and Friends” and they had Charlie Daniels playing on the compilation, and I swore it was Charlie playing the fiddle, I was wrong, it was Jeremy.
Well, this is their second CD done for Mountain Home Records, and I can’t say enough about how good the recording sounds. It shows that you do not have to go to Nashville to get a good recording. Well, Let me leave some to your imagination.
