The Dead South Easy Listening for Jerks - Part 1 10" Vinyl EP

A rock band without a drummer, a bluegrass band without a fiddler. To the gentlemen of The Dead South, a self-styled 4-piece string band from Regina, Saskatchewan, it's about how, not what, you play. Their sound, built on a taut configuration of cello, mandolin, banjo and guitar, speeds like a train past polite definitions of acoustic music into the grittier, rowdier spaces of the bluegrass world.

Carter Family meets Addams Family in Easy Listening for Jerks, two covers EPs by the gold-certified prairie pickers. Rich with quality finger picking and replete with harmonies, Easy Listening for Jerks offers many new moods of songs you think you know so well. Under a title that recalls the songwriting humor of Roger Miller and Steve Martin's comedy stylings alike, the EPs offer a surprising and compelling mix of gravity and levity. Foggy Mountain Boys, but make it Beetlejuice.

Easy Listening for Jerks - Part 1 includes the Sun belt-meets-black belt take on "You Are My Sunshine", in which The Dead South dig below the surface layer lullaby to levels of deep desperation, a mood well suited to the prospector's baritone of Nate Hilts. In a minor key, "Keep on the Sunny Side", changes from sweet to sinister. "Matterhorn", a gallant adventure tale that sees four friends set off to climb a mountain, also works on the level of The Dead South's origin story. "It's closer here to heaven than it is back to the ground," goes the song, now also a fitting encapsulation of the band's feelings of anxiety and exhilaration about returning to life on the road.