This weekend brought some good tunes to the hole.  Friday night featured a co-bill of Head For The Hills and Elephant Revival at The Town Square Tavern (possibly my least favorite venue of all time, but beggars can’t be choosers in such a small town… I guess).  Due to the fact that I was working, I missed all but the last ten minutes of the Head For The Hills show, though what I heard was solid.  A conference with a buddy confirmed that it was a rocking set.  Elephant Revival took the stage to a loud and social crowd.  To make matters worse, the right speaker wasn’t working, making the music more-or-less inaudible to anyone not standing directly in front of the left one.  The speaker issue was resolved in due time, though it did take about twenty minutes.  The crowd slowly began to shut up, maybe deciding to show some respect for the music, though I’m not going to give them that much credit.  Bitching aside, I thought that Elephant Revival put on a great show.  I have been listening to their new album, Break In The Clouds, a lot recently, and was excited to get to see a bunch of these tracks in a live setting.  All-in-all I thought that the music was phenomenal, and every time I see these guys I like them a little bit more.  There just isn’t anything else out there that sounds quite like Elephant Revival, and they’ve won me over for sure.

Last night, The Emmitt-Nershi Band played at The Mangy Moose.  Once again, work stood in the way of my getting to the show on time.  In fact, I missed the entire first set, and got the third to last ticket, since they don’t allow you to buy tickets in advance at The Moose (what?).  I haven’t seen the band since the addition of bass player Johnny Grubb (recently of Railroad Earth).  Wow, what a difference!  I have always thought that the only thing this band was lacking was an upright bass, and now they have it, with one hell of a player behind it.  Killer second set with a Texas encore made up for my missing the first hour of music.  The place was packed, and everyone was boogying hard.  So far as I could tell, everyone there, band and crowd, were having a blast.  I couldn’t get the shit-eating grin off my face all night, come to think of it, its still there.

Above: Here’s an old shot of Billy and Drew from The Georgia Theatre in Athens, Georgia.  Classic Nershi.