by River Bryan
Grackles celebrated their newest album, Grackles Deux: The Grackling, at the Continental Club on September 20th. From left to right: Gabriel Lit, Jason Mozersky, Lauren Harris, Noah Lit, Kyle Schneider (back), Sam Raver, Aaron Herbster, Josh Lit. Photo by Rhylee Lionberger.
“We are Grackles and we love Continental Club! We love it!”
Grackles frontman Noah Lit addressed the crowd at the Continental Club on Saturday, the renowned venue where loud and vigorous music can ricochet from one wall to the next. The room is both atmospheric and celebratory–the band is kicking off their sophomore album, Grackles Deux: The Grackling, which Lit described to KOOP as “[wanting] to rock a bit more” in a “tight, seventies-rock kind of way.” The band poured stadium-sized jam rock, blues, and Americana into the famously intimate room, where the vibrational hums of electric guitars, bass, and drums are especially felt in the chest, and the doors stay open, allowing music to pour out onto a vibrant South Congress.
Helmed by Lit, the project has seen members and collaborators with prolific recording histories. Guitarists Jason Mozersky and Eric Zapata are longtime cohorts of Ben Harper and Gary Clark Jr., respectively, while drummer Jimmy Paxon’s long musical resume spans the likes of Beyoncé, Stevie Nicks, The Chicks, and Steve Miller. With the lineup slightly varying between recordings and performances, Grackles Deux: The Grackling developed their concentration on nostalgic musicality, with the album emphasizing strings over aesthetics and Lit’s Waits-esque dark vocal style.
The set began with “There Will Be Time” and “I Love You (So Much),” both issued as singles earlier this summer ahead of the album’s release. From there, the band’s versatility came alive from country rock (“Baja”) to blues (“When I’m Gone”) to rockabilly (“I Need a Little Sugar”) to jam rock (“Send Back The Roses”), where, like notable genre-benders Grateful Dead and the Allman Brothers Band, the songs feel more destined to be played live, nearly rendering their studio counterparts as demos for a larger creative stratosphere.
Both a nostalgic sound tapestry as well as Lit’s self-described “I Love Austin” band, the group settles fittingly into the venue, which turned 70 this year and is lauded as one of Austin’s longest-running live music outlets. Said Lit ahead of the gig, “It’ll feel like it did in 2010, or probably 1995, in a lot of ways. That’s what I love about that space and that room; it just feels like the music scene that we kind of came up in.”
In the city’s era of worldwide SXSW and ACL fame, the spirit of locality only emphasizes the grandiosity of the band’s sound, which is fiercely contained within the Continental’s small and lively space. Underscoring that ethos, the band handed out free vinyl copies of Deux to the crowd, a gesture that reflected an evening driven by a shared love for the craft.
You can catch Grackles performing at Half Step Bar on October 1st as part of Sun Radio’s Texas Radio Live series. Their newest release, Grackles Deux: The Grackling, is streaming on Spotify, Apple Music, and other major platforms. For more of KOOP’s interview with frontman Noah Lit, click here.