“The SteelDrivers” by the SteelDrivers

The SteelDrivers
The SteelDrivers
Rounder Records
4 stars (out of 5)

Pressing play on The SteelDrivers for the first time while looking at the title of the first track (”Blue Side of the Mountain”), one would expect to hear more of the same old thing. Especially from a bunch of session players making a side project out of pickin a little bluegrass.

But after a few guitar strums, Chris Stapleton lets loose with “There’s a place in a piney hollow / that no one but me can find / some Choctaw built it in the hillside / stone by stone in a simpler time” in a full-throaed holler - somewhere between Journeyman-era Eric Clapton and Mountain’s Leslie West - and you realize this quintet isn’t trying to make their version of So Long, So Wrong.

“So deep and dark / like a hurtin’ down in my heart,” sings Stapleton in the chorus of “Blue Side,” offering as good a description as any of his vocal approach that dominates the disc and distinguishes it from the rest of anything remotely as grassy you’ll hear this year.

Joining Stapleton’s guitar to form an always-bluesy foundation to these 11 tunes are Richard Bailey’s banjo and Mike Fleming’s thumping upright.

Tammy Rogers’ fiddle and Mike Henderson’s mandolin provide all the tasty fills and breaks your ear can handle, and all of the songs are better than most.

The only quarrel with The SteelDrivers is that, as different as their sound is from the rest of the bluegrass and Americana pack, it doesn’t vary much on this disc.

They stick to their potent formula without experimenting with something as raw and satisfying as Stapleton’s voice.

by Aaron Keith Harris