First Rodeo w/ Sunbeam & Silver Tree @ Radio Bean

$10 / 18+

First Rodeo (Insta | Bandcamp | Spotify)

First Rodeo is the cross-country songwriting and recording project of Nathan Tucker (Strange Ranger, Cool Original, Pontiac Flare) and Tim Howe (Vista House, The Great American Commute). Though the longtime friends had been playing in each other’s bands since 2014, it somehow wasn’t until Tucker moved to Philadelphia, far away from lifelong Oregonian Howe, that the two hatched the bright idea to start a band where they both wrote songs. The duo’s sophomore LP Rode Hard and Put Away Wet, out May 16th on Bud Tapes, is the sound of this decade-plus of musical kinship, comfortable and restless in the same breath.

First Rodeo’s 2022 self-titled debut was a product of a time and place: the band spent a week in a cabin in the San Juans and emerged with a focused collection of songs in the vein of 90s and early aughts alt-country. Rode Hard and Put Away Wet is pretty much the exact opposite. Tucker and Howe spent the better part of six months passing ideas back and forth over the internet, getting in the same room when they could, and slowly shaping an album that metabolizes the sprawl of 3,000 miles and five decades of American (or at least America-obsessed) popular music into 8 tracks that repurpose the sounds of country in unexpected ways. Harmonica and fiddle are stretched and sliced next to distorted drums and chorus-drenched synthesizers; friends from both coasts adorn laptop arrangements with banjo, pedal steel, and slide guitar overdubs.

Tucker and Howe wanted to experiment without the restrictions of limited studio time—or room for gear in the car—but the goal was to fuck around as much as to be fastidious. Even the seemingly most orchestrated moments are often first or second takes, or improvised performances that have been sampled, edited, or otherwise manipulated to cohere into a whole without losing their spontaneity.

The resulting record, like the musical tradition that inspired it, feels well-traveled but not exhausted, developed but not overbaked. The Howe-fronted “Dusk 2” and “Sunset Highway” combine dusty Casios and modulated guitars to evoke the road hypnosis of a long drive through the endless west. Tucker’s “See If U Flinch” updates a Stones-indebted bar-band groove with pitch-shifted congas and an electric piano straight out of 90’s R&B. Opener “The Crying Hour (Dry Version)” reimagines one of Tucker’s old songs by adding lap steel and a synth marimba to a duo guitar performance recorded live in a friend’s cavernous furniture workshop.

That fine line between well-worn and worn-out is on the mind of both songwriters throughout Rode Hard’s 36 minutes—perhaps most clearly on album centerpiece “Nothing,” which sees Tucker and Howe trade verses in a half-spoken cadence lifted from 90s radio rock. Tape-slowed harmonica peaks out over densely layered guitars and a brick-walled drum loop, as “Nothing” frenetically builds towards a hook that plays something like a Rauschenberg rendering of a Son Volt song. In some ways it’s the exception that proves the rule, the album outlier that also embodies this saturated collage of American road music. Faded from years of reliability. Well-loved, weary, and reinvented. Rode Hard and Put Away Wet.