Silverada and Jason Scott and the High Heat
The Atlantis, Washington, DC August 30, 2024
I generally don’t see a lot of country music shows, but I do follow the recommendations of my friends, and for the last couple of years a few of my friends have been raving about an Austin-based ensemble called Mike and the Moonpies, a name that generated little other than skepticism.
Mike and his aforementioned Moonpies rebranded themselves this year to
Silverada, a name that seems aimed at asserting greater cachet and a historically resonant mythical Southwestern identity, and he recently
sat down for a podcast with my friends talking through his new album and songwriting. I was sufficiently impressed to see their show at the Atlantis on a Friday leading into the Labor Day weekend.
Country shows in DC are always an interesting cultural collision. There is a substantial audience for country music in and around the Washington area, but it’s below the radar screen most of the times, so to see actual two-stepping and cowboy hats in a DC club is always a bit of a surprise, even for a show like the Silverada gig. When the band took the stage, I was impressed by the number of audience members who were singing along to older tracks, from the Moonpies days, but the intro was the Silverada mission statement:
“Radio Wave” is a perfect song within a tried-and-true formula, a tribute to the ephemeral freedoms granted by a song that strikes you at the right moment. And only a true country writer would be able to twist a set of hackneyed phrases to come up with a memorable chorus like, “Whoah, when I get up in the morning I don’t bother to shave / Whoah, got one foot on the gas and one in the grave / Whoah, in the land of the free and the home of the brave / Whoah, I’m just drifting away on a radio wave.”
In the course of the deep set list, which no one saved to setlist.fm, but appeared to be similar to the
one played in Massachusetts a few days earlier, the band moved from sly rip-roaring honkytonk (“Smoke ‘Em if You Got ‘Em”) to self-deprecating slice of life tales (“You Look Good in Neon”); the fanbase from the Moonpies day was pretty enthusiastic for the old songs throughout, but the calibre of the material from the new
Silverada record was all uniformly good. Indeed, the band played nine songs from Silverada, along a sampling of the Mike and the Moonrise records, including
Cheap Silver and Country Gold (which my friend maintains is one of the great records of past years) and
Steak Night at the Prairie Rose. It was an ambitiously long set list, which I realize has to do with country bands and the expectations that the audience would be dancing.
Opener,
Jason Scott and the High Heat from Oklahoma City were impressively soulful and have a lot of star power, at least on vocals, although many of the songs were a bit generic in lyrics and theme. The most impressive was “Roll Back the Stone,” a heartfelt critique of the political and economic systems that allow rural people to fall into poverty and addiction, while their religious institutions fail to offer more than platitudes. They did paeans to the weary burden of “Yard Work” and tributes to “Quittin’ Time,” and a heartfelt cover of George Strait’s “The Fireman.”
Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 09/20/2024 08:33PM by zwirnm.
