[Editor’s Note: While ‘Heavy Soul & Boogie Trance’ has been out since the start of the year, its Nebraska release is this Friday at The Hive in Omaha. Kris Lager Band also plays The Bourbon on Feb. 28. Additionally, Kris Lager Band’s Brandon Miller announced yesterday he would be stepping down as the band’s full-time bassist to focus on other projects, most especially booking and managing Sokol Park. That’s the site of the annual Hullaballoo Music Festival, July 23-25 this year.]
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In an alternate universe, there’s a version of Kris Lager Band that plays The Hive and the Zoo Bar once a month. Its members work their day jobs in Lincoln or Omaha. Maybe they spend a week or two a year on tour. Their friends are mostly Nebraska musicians and the band’s love of blues and roots rock is inflected by a small and active scene in Nebraska. In this universe, the musicianship would no doubt be there. The album they release in 2015 probably sounds the venues where they crafted the songs. It probably sounds like home.
What’s exciting about the actual Heavy Soul & Boogie Trance is that it sounds like homelessness. It sounds like the national music melting pot into which the band has thrown itself head-long during the last two or three years. In that window, Kris Lager Band has easily spent more than half its time on the road.
Who knows if this conversation ever occurred, but the line of thought invoked by this album is: “If we’re going to be on the road most of the year, live this way, meet countless musicians with our same goals and shoot for something big, let’s make a record that sounds like it.”
If not lyrically, Heavy Soul & Boogie Trance puts the listener on the highway from its inciting moment. The lead track, “All Strung Out,” boasts a driving strum that practically shouts, “We’re three hours from the next town, and we need to throw down tonight no matter what.” Two minutes in, Lager lets out a series of (albeit sexual-sounding) screams, like cresting an enormous hill and cruising forward from there.
In a lot of ways, the phrases “heavy soul” and “boogie trance” tell the story of genre for the album. But they don’t quite reflect how sonically sharp it is. Kris Lager Band has jammed longer and less inhibited on past records. But they’ve never worked out of song structures that feel so written to maximize hooks, emphasize single instrument lines and distinguish so many individual songs.
And back on the conceptual side, this album nods at the van stereo, where KLB may have blasted the last half-decade’s best soul and rock records while on tour. It nods at the band’s new national rolodex of contacts. Heavy Soul was recorded at Transistor Sound Studios in San Rafael, Cal., with Monophonics’ Kelly Finnigan and Ian McDonald. It was mixed by Orgone bandleader Sergio Rios from Los Angeles.
Finnigan, by the way, takes the vibraphone and vocal lead on a stand-out track “Money & Loneliness,” which gestures at tasteful neo-soul acts like St. Paul and the Broken Bones.
“Take Care of You” sounds like it was born out of a serious Black Keys Brothers kick. “Eureka Bound” is the band at its silver-linings best (think “Sunny Day Solider”), one of their strongest life-is-love songs to date (and they have many.) Three Dog Night is in there, but probably a better reference is the time the band spent touring with singer-pianist Andy Frasco.
The dabbling, collaborating and the sharp writing all create the feeling these songs snugly reside on this record. That’s their first life. When the band takes them to the live stage, they may add two minutes to each and use different pedal effects and loosen the parts into a jam. But I’d argue Heavy Soul‘s essential album-ness has never been so pronounced in their discography.
If you’re going to go out into the music world — give up years of warm beds, neighborhood bars and time with your family — maybe the best thing you can be is a sponge.