Tangleweed

Chicago-based Tangleweed is a "foot stompin', moonshine drinkin'" group that has an alluring je ne sais quoi that is sturdy and self-assured. Full of exuberance and energy, the quintet's rough edges are starting to smooth out since their live debut "Just A Spoonful" album. No personnel changes have definitely brought their strings tighter, and "Where You Been Gone So Long?" was wisely recorded in a more controlled studio environment. Timothy Ryan Fisher (banjo), Paul Wargaski (upright bass), Billy Oh (fiddle), Kenneth Rainey (mandolin), and Scott Judd (guitar) share chemistry that results in some good-time music inspired from old-time, bluegrass, jug band, swing, gypsyjazz and Irish airs.

Playing regularly since mid-2004, Tangleweed's strength is their infectious enthusiasm and varied repertoire. "I've Found A New Baby" is a carefully-cultivated classic 1930s jazz standard, and their medley of jigs and reels or "Leaving of Liverpool" convey hues of emerald green. A tune like "Drunkard's Blues" is presented with authentic grit. The band's original old-time protest song bewailing war and poverty, "Hard Times,' gives Tangleweed a sound not too dissimilar from the New Lost City Ramblers. Also written by all members of the band, the title cut speaks to "being broke and hungry, sleepin' on the floor" and "twelve hours on a Trailways bus to sleep here by your side." That cut epitomizes Tangleweed's bluegrass spunk. This string band's eclectic repertoire has a little something for everyone in a big urban environment like the Windy City. In fact, their varied music is quite breezy and refreshing too. This mostly excitable, frenzied set ends with another face of Tangleweed - "Last Call Waltz" with its one minute of doleful yodeling recorded in the empty stairwell of an old Chicago building. (Joe Ross) - Joe Ross, Staff Writer, Bluegrass Now

Chicago Tribune
April 3, 2009


Tangleweed’s Deep, Rich American Roots, by Andy Downing


Bluegrass quintet Tangleweed delves deep into American musical history for its repertoire, mining songs from classic Folkways reissues, dusty 78s and countless CD box sets. So it should go without saying that the title of its third album, “Most Folk Heroes Started Out As Criminals,” is lifted from some obscure 1920s standard, right? Wrong.


“It’s [from] ‘Slap Shot,’ ” says mandolinist/singer Kenneth Rainey. “Three of us are current or former hockey players, so that movie is like a fountain of wisdom for us.”


That the album title is culled from a Paul Newman comedy turns out to be just one of the surprises Rainey has in store.


The onetime punk rocker, who grew up listening to the likes of the Replacements and Minor Threat, purchased his first mandolin just 10 years ago, after being turned on to roots music by guitarist Curt Kirkwood of the Meat Puppets. So how could a guitarist from a boozy crew of Arizona rockers inspire Rainey to dig into our country’s musical past?


“In no way was it a clear progression from one to the other,” stresses Rainey. “It was always just one beautiful accident after another.”


The process started when the mandolinist delved into Kirkwood’s influences, turning up folk singer Doc Watson. Watson, in turn, led Rainey to old Folkways recordings and rare 78s from the ’20s and ’30s.


Even more surprising are Rainey’s views on traditional bluegrass (especially in light of the fact that the group is playing the inaugural Chicago Bluegrass Festival this weekend).


“The actual canon for bluegrass is not really that compelling,” he says. “A lot of it tends to be this overly saccharine, nostalgic sound.”


Instead, Tangleweed reaches further back to the pre-bluegrass era of early American string band music.


According to Rainey, these earlier songs contain “real human emotion,” touching on sex, death, religion and poverty. The quintet’s embrace of these early roots has even carried over into the recording process; the group recorded its debut, “Just a Spoonful,” live to two-track on the second floor of guitarist Scott Judd’s house in Logan Square, mimicking the style of an old-time field recording.


This time around, the recording was beset by complications, including a pressing plant that took the band’s payment, neglected to produce a product and then stopped taking its calls altogether. Though the crew was eventually able to recover its money, the delay added nearly three months to the process—a process that can be quite agonizing even when things run smoothly. “Every song we do, we tear apart and rearrange for the band,” says Rainey. “It’s consensus building by five people who aren’t always inclined to agree.”
- Chicago Tribune

Over the Xmas break I was given the film ‘The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford’ (a great film in my opinion and I can’t stand Brad Pitt usually). I mention this because Tangleweed have made a record that could have been a soundtrack for that film.

This is country music from a simpler time, with banjos and fiddles taking centre stage. The ‘Weed’ are a five piece band with Billy Oh taking vocals and fiddle, Kenneth Rainey (mandolin & vocals), Paul Wargaski (bass), T R Fisher (banjo, vocals) & Scott Judd (guitar, vocals). Taking traditional songs and their own songs written by the entire band, there is nothing to dislike on this record.

The song titles show that the lads are entrenched in their roots: ‘Logjam’, ‘Pick Poor Robin Clean’, ‘Join The British Army – The Dubliners’, and ‘Mississippi Trashboat’ – you can see what territory we are in here. Anyone with Bill Monroe and Flatt & Scruggs in their collection will enjoy this record. - Americana UK

TANGLEWEED You know you’ve found a good CD when you can’t decide whether to wax more rhapsodic about its music or its liner notes. Liner notes first: Tangleweed’s debut, Just a Spoonful and Other Folksongs of Rural Cook County (Squatney), includes some deadpan and brutal parodies of po-faced folk-geek annotation. (On the manifold hardships and hardscrabble lives so commonly endured by folk musicians: “Most were forced to leave college after graduation.” On “Old Joe Clark”: “There are lyrics for this tune, but I’ve never heard them sung by someone sober enough to be intelligible.”) The music’s a rough-and-ready, busy take on the squeaky, scratchy, lively brand of bluegrass, which I much prefer to the slick, hillbilly-fusion variety. Tangleweed also plays as part of Pictures and Sounds 2006, a multimedia event presented by WHPK and the University of Chicago Film Studies Center; see Saturday for more info. Three on the Tree and Lost Ghost Lounge open. –> 10 PM, Red Line Tap, 7006 N. Glenwood, 773-274-5463, $5. –Monica Kendrick - Chicago Reader

TANGLEWEED - JUST A SPOONFUL
Squatney Records 45000

The rest of the title of this collection of old time tunes is"...And Other Folksongs Of Rural Cook County." Cook County surrounds the metropolis of Chicago where this live jam took place. And, although the band recorded this in the heart of the big city, an authentic approach was what the members of Tangleweed sought after with this project. The band consists of Billy Oh on fiddle and vocals, Kenneth P.W. Rainey on mandolin and vocals, Paul Wargaski on bass, Timothy Ryan Fisher on banjo and vocals, and Scott Judd on guitar.

As the liner notes tell us, this CD was recorded "in the style of an old field recording." The band found an empty apartment where they setup a two track analog recorder and used two microphones to capture these tunes that were recorded on a single afternoon. Every song was recorded live with no overdubs added in later. As Rainey says in theliner notes about this fly by the seat of your pants approach, "You can hear floorboards creak between takes. You can hear feet stomping...it is a flawed record, but also a very human one."

The CD starts off with a rollicking version of "Train 45." That is followed by a swinging string band version of Duke Ellington's "C-Jam Blues." Both of these songs feature what old time usually doesn't--improvisation. So, in a sense, this music is bluegrass, yet with a distinctive old time feel to it. One of the songs that fall squarely into the bluegrass category is high tempo version of Doug and Rodney Dillard's "Banjo In The Holler." Other highlights include some fine fiddle work on "Blackberry Blossom," along with a
nice version of "Old Joe Clark. "There are times when the sound of this CD is a little muddled due to microphone placement. But the spontaneous nature of this fun jam session comes through loud and clear. - Bluegrass Unlimited

You know I sometimes see a word or name and take an instant liking to it. Most recently it was the name Tangleweed. I saw it on the sleeve of a CD and was instantly warmed to it. The music on that disc warmed me even more for this five piece from Chicago play some of the purest bluegrass and most authentic traditional country I have heard in some time. “Just A Spoonful: And Other Folksongs Of Rural Cook County” (Squatney) contains wonderful instrumentals such as “C-Jam Blues”, “Blackberry Blossom” and “Old Joe Clark” and great vocal performances of “Lay Me A Pallet On The Floor”, “Katy Kline”, “Ragged But Right” and “Orange Blossom Special”. - The Advertiser

They hit on all eight cylinders! - Sing Out!

Americana-UK review by David Cowling

This is the kind of music that makes even your kitchen utensils dance, so infectious is its blend of bluegrass, country, jazz and rock, you’ll do well to stop the dish running away with the spoon. Interspersing traditional songs, covers and some very decent originals like ‘Hard Times’ – which has a mandolin solo so delinquent that you’ll want to slap an ASBO on it – they create a party atmosphere and with the songs usually clocking in below three minutes, you don’t get chance to be bored. They take on jazz standards like ‘I’ve Found a New Baby’ and with the fiddle taking the brassy lead they confuse it into submission. There is a maelstrom of plucking, banging, sawing and shouting that give the songs an irresistible momentum, and they leap at you like an overfriendly Labrador. ‘Leaving of ‘Liverpool’ comes as something of a relief, the vocals are melancholic, up front and downright folky and with the guitar as the lead instrument it provides an interesting counterpoint to the frenetic activity that has gone before. An unabashedly old-fashioned record, traditional and proud and with enough energy and skill to convince any doubter. - Americana-UK

The packaging of Tangleweed’s Where You Been So Long looks just like a mini vinyl record, and the roots rock sounds found inside are just as vintage. The project was recorded with Mike Hagler (Wilco, Billy Bragg) whose ingenious fingerprints are especially evident throughout the blistering bluegrass of "Black-Eyed Susie," the old-time country nugget "Drunkard’s Blues,”\" and the finger-picking fury of "Hard Times."

– Andy Argyrakis - Illinois Entertainer

by Jamie Winpenny / 02-21-2007

Calling Tangleweed a bluegrass band is accurate, but it’s unfair, too. Yep, they’ve got the fiddle, the mandolin and the rest of the acoustic accoutrements that compose an outfit that warrants a stereotype, but Tangleweed somehow pokes fun at folk music while honoring its storied legacy. Their arrival in Honolulu for gigs at rRed Elephant and Ward Rafters over the weekend will let those in attendance in on the joke.

These guys don’t even have a drummer. It’s five of them, assembled in Chicago, arranging a masterful pastiche of original compositions and traditional tunes from a prodigious archive of musical Americana and Celtic mischief. There is something more than vaguely punk rock about Tangleweed’s music, but the accuracy of their harmonies and the tactical proficiency of their musicianship indicate a predilection for form over function.

As evidenced by song titles like "Hard Times" and "Make Me a Pallet on the Floor, " Tangleweed’s music isn’t far from the ancient sources of its inspiration, but it is also ticklishly close to the kind of irreverence that makes for brilliant pop songs and beer commercials. - Honolulu Weekly