Listening Party: South 85

August 29th, 2008 by Steve Shanafelt
From www.spartanburgspark.com

The first thing that struck me about South 85 wasn’t their music, but rather who they came recommended by. I was looking over the show list on Ground Zero’s MySpace, when I read the following “South 85. Spartanburg’s own soon to-be-famous country and folk-rock act!” Since Ground Zero isn’t really known as a country or folk venue, just the fact that the band was playing there at all was curious. But it was the resounding endorsement - very uncommon in the venue’s show listings - that really caught my eye.

So, I gave them a listen. My first conclusion, reached about six seconds into the song “Chains,” was that Ground Zero wasn’t wrong. There’s a lot to like here.

That said, while some of their songs are definitely in the country and/or folk genres, their sound is actually far more firmly rooted in the admittedly vague “alt-country” label. Sure, there’s a banjo into on the song “Hold Me,” but as soon as the song starts properly, the progression is pure alt-country - maybe even a little indie rock - but hardly mainstream country or folk by any means.

It’s more like they’ve added accents from these genres - a little mandolin here, a little waltz beat there, a Skynyrd-inspired Southern-rock breakdown in the corner - but the underlying influences are anything but Nashville formula hat-act material. Sure, frontwoman Tracy Wyatt tends to sing with a bit of twang, and, if you had to, you could make a casual comparison to someone like “neotraditional” country singer Lee Ann Womack. But Wyatt doesn’t seem to be relying on her twang - it’s there, certainly, but it’s not the centerpiece of the vocals.

That said, in listening to two of their most compelling songs, “El Camino” and “Kind of Man,” I could easily see why they’ve escaped the alt-country label. It had less to do with the music itself, and more to do with the lyrics, which explore classic country music themes - a post-break-up hook-up while “riding to Reno in a beat-up El Camino” and how “the only kind of man that drives me crazy is the kind of man who tells me he don’t want me,” respectively. That’s definitely CMT’s turf.

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