The Dead South Easy Listening for Jerks - Part 2 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 2 is inspired by the band's own pre-show playlist, and includes songs by System of a Down, The Doors, Cold War Kids, and Ween. The Dead South dust off "People Are Strange", with an entertaining video that puts an intergalactic spin on the song's theme of alienation. On "Chop Suey", not a no-brainer for an acoustic band without a drummer, the band transcends the song's metal origins and doubles up on Scott Pringle's vocals for a sound as big as the first. Part 2 also sees the vocal debut of banjoist Colton "Crawdaddy" Crawford, who offers a deadpan rendition of Ween's "Help Me Scrape the Mucus off My Brain".