Dustbowl Revival

http://www.dustbowlrevival.com/

Dustbowl Revival is an Americana Soul band with eight full-time members who mash the sounds of New Orleans funk, bluegrass, soul, pre-war blues, and roots music, into a genre-hopping, time-bending dance party that coaxes new fire out of familiar coal. Dustbowl is touring behind their self-titled, fourth studio album which spent three weeks on Billboard charts, hit #1 on Amazon Americana-Alt-Country, #2 on Amazon Folk, and spent 16 weeks on the Americana radio chart peaking in the Top 20. 

The band was founded in 2008 in the bohemian enclave of Venice Beach, California. Over the last five years Dustbowl has become known for their free-flowing and joyous live shows, combining their funk rhythm and brass section with a fast-picking string band section – opening for bands as diverse as Lake Street Dive, Trombone Shorty and The Preservation Hall Jazz Band, touring China as a guest of the state department and headlining festivals like Delfest, Floydfest, Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, and recently Bergenfest (Norway) and Tonder Festival (Denmark). The band received a big wave of attention with their music video that featured famous actor Dick Van Dyke for “Never Had to Go”, which garnered over 10 million cumulative views. That video is now airing in an HBO Doc titled “If You’re Not in the Obit, Eat Breakfast” starring Jerry Seinfeld, Mel Brooks, and Dick Van Dyke.  

While the band has been known for their old-time and bluegrass roots, they have departed from those styles and evolved more into modern soul music. Now, with Producer Grammy Award-winning Ted Hutt (Old Crow Medicine Show, Gaslight Anthem, Dropkick Murphys) who collaborated on the recent album, Dustbowl Revival brings it on, in the good company of neo-Soul contemporaries such as Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats and St. Paul & The Broken Bones. The album delivers eleven hot tracks, dominated by love-triangle funk & soul, tenderized with a nod to the unlikely possibility of true love – i.e. “Honey I Love You”, with Grammy Award-winning blues artist Keb’ Mo’ sitting in. 

This exhilarating new sound jumps out on the album’s opening tracks, “Call My Name” and “If You Could See Me Now.” Drummer Joshlyn Heffernan and bassist James Klopfleisch lay down a righteous groove that trumpeter Matt Rubin and trombonist Ulf Bjorlin supercharge with their big blasts of horns. This Stax-style soul builds to a pair of showstoppers: “Good Egg” and “The Story.” The former is a dynamic number that showcases Liz Beebe’s sexy, full-throttled vocals as well as Bjorlin’s dirty trombone solo. On “The Story,” Beebe teams with band founder Zach Lupetin for an emotionally charged love song that features some infectious interplay between the horn players and the string-men (mandolinist Daniel Mark and fiddler Connor Vance). 

From an Outside Lands Music Festival review, Rob Sheffield, in Rolling Stone, hailed them as a great band “whose Americana swing was so fun I went back to see them again the next day.”