Country Westerns Revel in Rock at The Blue Room

“Maybe we should go back to the bush league,” quipped singer-guitarist Joey Plunket, wiping sweat from his face a few songs into Country Westerns’ set Saturday night at The Blue Room at Third Man Records. 

“Eh, we only got 32 more songs left to play,” deadpanned touring bassist Jordan Jones from the other side of the stage.

For the previous 15 minutes or so, drummer Brian Kotzur had joined his bandmates in what amounted to an intense cardio workout, treating his kit like a sparring partner. He just leaned forward and took some deep breaths. 

Celebrating the release of their second LP Forgive the City, Country Westerns wore the mantle of rock ’n’ roll lifers well. As are many of the folks they collaborate with, Plunket and Kotzur are veterans of various scenes and bands. For a small sampling, Plunket was part of Gentleman Jesse and His Men and led a band called JP5 before he took a break to focus on opening Five Points bar Duke’s with partner Sara Nelson, while Kotzur plays with his fellow former Silver Jews band member William Tyler in Tyler’s group The Impossible Truth. 

Plunket and Kotzur have developed a big batch of anthemic songs that orbit the idea of centering yourself in a fucked-up world, married to great punk-tinged rock sound that doesn’t try to hide its Southern accent as it drives forward like a freight train. Touring clubs a few months at a time seems like a great fit, but if the opportunity comes to do something bigger, they leave little doubt that they could take it on. They’re at a point where they can decide what makes sense for them — and what keeps the joy of writing and playing at the forefront.

Listening to Runaways deep cuts and other tunes selected by DJ Jemina Pearl wasn’t a bad way for a handful of us early birds to spend half an hour before the opening set, and the room began to fill as pop ’n’ rock champs Ornament settled in. Frontman Will Mann, who plays guitar and keys, and his longtime musical partner, drummer-singer Ryan Donoho, are also stalwarts of local rock, who’ve been in and around local bands since they were teens in the late Aughts and early 2010s; they were joined by bassist Linda Parrott and guitarist Connor Theriot. The band’s evolving sound includes touches of pop-minded British rockers like The Kinks and Nick Lowe, James Gang-esque American hard rock and a bit of yacht rock. It serves their songs very well, especially set highlight “Sometimes People Get Together and They Dance,” a clever and heartfelt tune from last year’s LP Rock Solid that encourages listeners to avoid the distractions of the digital world and, y’know, mingle with others in person.

Up next was NYC’s Joanna Sternberg, who sat down with only an acoustic guitar and reeled off three bittersweet and quietly intense songs in a row, not saying a word between them. On the surface, their fingerpicked country, folk and blues licks and their lyrics both seem simple in construction, but are exceptionally sophisticated and powerful, in a way that recalls Neutral Milk Hotel’s Jeff Mangum. Life can throw emotional haymakers at you all day long, for no other reason than you exist; Sternberg’s songs feel like an inspiring way to land a few back. After the third song, they revealed themselves as a funny and charming person, who channels all their nervous energy into performing; the rest of their show was filled with interludes, asides and jokes. Not talking for the top of the set wasn’t their idea, but that of guitarist’s guitarist and producer’s producer Matt Sweeney, who was offering encouragement from the front row. His many credits include both of Country Westerns’ albums as well as Sternberg’s forthcoming I’ve Got Me.

Then it was time for the band of the hour to plunge headfirst into their set list, scrawled on the back of a large Five Points Pizza box. Kotzur pounded away at the drums while Jones filled the low register with athletic, melodic lines. Plunket swapped between his bespoke Scale Model Guitars electric 12-string and a Danelectro 12-string whose lowest pair of strings was gone — perhaps intentionally, as Keith Richards once demonstrated for Sweeney in a video for Vice’s Noisey — while growling out the wry reflections and hard-won wisdom gleaned from a life in and around the strange, often-unkind music business.

Sweeney’s guitar and amp were set up, so it was clear he’d planned to sit in. Following Sweeney’s production tradition of “tough love,” as Plunket recently described it to Scene contributor Charlie Zaillian, there was some lighthearted back-and-forth about which songs he’d play. “Getting produced, even on the stage,” Plunket said with a grin, as Sweeney pushed his sunglasses down to consult the pizza box. He’s a hands-on producer who gets to know artists’ material very well and often plays on their records, and he nonchalantly inserted wiry lead lines into the interstices of a three-song run that began with “Wait for It.”

Old songs sat comfortably alongside new ones. Some standouts from Forgive the City included “It’s a Livin’,” which includes the album’s titular lyric in its examination of living amid change, and the autobiographical “Country Westerns.” Near the end of the set were “At Any Time” and “Gentle Soul,” fist-in-the-air shout-along songs from the band’s 2020 debut Country Westerns. They sent us into the cool night with what Plunket called “a lullaby” — Dead Moon’s “A Miss of You,” with its punk rock prayer for battered souls: “I know the way now / This time it won’t take long.”

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