Sipos & Young

Sipos & Young
Deliver Fire and Substance
Songwriter’s songwriter Townes Van Zandt once said “There’s only two kinds of music: the blues and Zippity Doo Dah.”
In that context, acoustic duo Sipos and Young deliver the musical goods firmly on the side of substance. Their urbane Americana style pulls in the listener with intelligent song and verse that celebrates life’s spirited highs and acknowledges its undertows in a beguiling presentation unheard on everyday airwaves.
Chris Sipos and Rachel Young play acoustic music for the discerning listener. They delve into a multitude of genres ranging from upscale, in-vogue intonations to folk songs as haunting as the most ancient mountain hollow. A smoky jazz ballad sits beside a driving Johnny Cash-June Carter cover, while superb originals by Sipos are regularly stirred into the mix.
Their songs are worthy of attention; worlds beyond the hackneyed top 40 offerings of a noisy bar band. A musical set by Sipos and Young is a mind-expanding experience that jostles the explorer in us all, stepping beyond tried and true material into a sonic landscape of inventive awakening. The duo’s appeal is enjoyable on a number of levels, soothing the audience with eclectic covers, then slowly drawing it into deeper poetic waters.
Their influences, as one might imagine, lean in the cerebral direction -- Bob Dylan, Neil Young, The Band, Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen, Lou Reed, Bruce Cockburn, Richard Thompson, Guy Clark, Steve Earle, Wilco, Pink Floyd and the aforementioned Van Zandt, to name but a few. Sipos and Young deliver the intrinsic spirit of these artists in a multi-faceted presentation that alternately sets souls to yearning, toes to tapping and synapses to firing at accelerated rates.

The virtuoso guitar capabilities of Chris Sipos provide superb tempo and temperament for every intricately arranged offering in the pair’s songbook. The prodigiously accomplished multi-instrumentalist has been a working musician all his adult life and the fulcrum of every group he’s ever joined. A one-man band in this setting, he fills the spaces around and between vocals with blistering solos, beguiling hooks and intricate fills that add dimension and scope to every number.

Classically trained Rachel’s celestial singing style offers the perfect vehicle for the duo’s penchant toward music that shines a light on life’s ever-changing spectrum of emotions. The shimmering inflections wrap around her partner’s gravel-toned vocal eloquence to produce a third instrument of pleasingly precise articulation.

Together Sipos and Young are proof positive that musical entertainment can communicate spirit and essence in a single wallop.

--By Dave Masterson