Since their debut demo in 2000, The Transgressors have been bringing a resolutely singular breed of music to Austin, Texas' already varied and complex musical landscape. The idea for the band was born out of the mutual vision of Big Jeff Keyton (Bloody Tears, T. Tex Edwards) and Chad Nichols (Enduro), and the band's musical core lies in the blend of Keyton's reverb-drenched twang guitar and Nichols' rich baritone vocals, with vintage organ tones and mariachi-style trumpet providing occasional accents. While the Transgressors' main interest is roots music, they are not a typical Americana band. They take cues from such disparate material as post-psychedelic 60s rock, pre-British Invasion rock and roll, 80s minimalism, a variety of country styles (roots, Bakersfield, outlaw, and cosmopolitan, to name a few), and the film music of Ennio Morricone and Angelo Badalamenti. This is honky-tonk music for the dyed-hair set. Or soundtrack music for the PBR crowd. Or sometimes just plain high-octane, dragstrip rock and roll.
Where the roots influence really comes across is in the band's lyrics. The Transgressors are storytellers, and they weave haunting tales of loss, misery, and frustrated vengeance. The songs are simple, straightforward narratives that traffic in the kind of universal truths found throughout American folk music--tragedy, deceit, death--but the dynamic arrangements throw them into a kind of relief, giving them a more cinematic scope. The imagery found herein is the imagery of a lawless, gothic Texas landscape, and it brings to mind the work of such Texas authors as Jim Thompson, Cormac McCarthy, and Larry McMurtry at the same time as it conjures the stylized American West of Sergio Leone.
Get the debut cd here:
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