JARED GRABB
PULLING WEIGHT
I hate the “ex-punk rocker gone folkie” tag. Seriously, set just about any Woody Guthrie song to distorted three chords and a fast beat. I thought so. This latest album by Grabb certainly isn’t at that level of greatness, but it does still prove that the two styles aren’t always mutually exclusive. Sure “Half-Empty Cup” mainly features the banjo, but has a line like “So, the knife comes down, and the shelves fill up. It took him 30 full years to fill that half?empty cup.” Plus the title track leans a lot more heavily on the dirty blues side than folk, and also has the “big business vs. working man” theme that most modern punk seems to have lost. (Thinker Thought) by Andrew Ryan Fetter