Welcome to this week’s Launch Box featuring:
The Underhill Family Orchestra
The Underhill Family Orchestra is a rowdy, warpaint-wearing, arm-swingin’-foot-stompin’ 6-piece Rock-and-Roll Americana outfit from the Alabama Delta. Since their formation in 2009, these twenty-somethings have produced two albums worth of music and played all over the southeast and the midwest bringing their sound, which mixes gypsy/jazz/folk/spiritual/soul/rock-and-roll and other surprises, to the ears and hearts of thousands of people.
Clearly influenced by the roots and folk scene that drives so much music that comes out of the south, Underhill takes these elements and brings their own modern interpretation to the beautiful sounds of the past. Instrumentation including a mandolin, acoustic guitars, and a simple Gretsch drum kit that would be welcome in any honky-tonk or bluegrass festival south of the Mason-Dixon, but Underhill does not stop at mere tradition with the use of this instrumentation, they go much, much further.
Developing a sound all their own, Underhill builds on these traditional elements by adding electric bass and guitar, subtle (and not so subtle) use of effects, and sudden (often violent) changes in tempo and intensity that are more at home in the prog-rock epics we see today than the simple structure common to most roots influenced tracks.
The group released its first album, “This Is …” in 2011. The allegedly fictional territory of “Appalachia Proper” is the setting for their second album Stories of Appalachia Proper released in 2013.
“Appalachia Proper is obviously not a place, but it could have been,” says Steven Underhill.
If it were a real town, it’d be a place tucked up at the end of a rarely traveled road, and the first time you drove through it, it would seem murky and quiet, an impenetrable thicket of brooding history. If you stopped long enough to start hearing tales, the passion and tragedy of the place would be startling, even overwhelming.
The album is like that too: A casual listen conveys mainly a sense of melancholy. You have to delve into it before you realize its true range, from its genuinely tender regard for lost love to the outright anthemic quality of its centerpiece tracks.
More recently they put out a video for “Showdown at St. Lawrence,” a song that very effectively captures the exuberant feel of the band’s live shows, as well as its ability to infuse sheer pop catchiness into the rootsier, grittier elements of its sound. That song isn’t a part of “Stories,” but Steven Underhill describes it as sort of a bridge between the folksier approach of “This Is …” and the more rock-oriented arrangements of the new album.
Take a look at their tour schedule – a stop in Lafayette is on the list!
