Rench has been creatively breaking the boundaries between America’s top two genres since the turn of the millennium. His twangy, funky, irresistible mix is proven to raise eyebrows and open minds in a big way, most notably with his project Gangstagrass and the Emmy nominated theme song to the hit FX Network show “Justified.” Now that he’s toured the world with the groundbreaking bluegrass-hip-hop group he founded, Rench pushes the envelope again with a solo album that completely reimagines Americana from the ground up.
This full length album due April 7, 2017, showcases an eclectic honky-tonk “bang and twang” sound. His uniquely broad and deep recipe brings together a rich tapestry of American styles. In “Them’s The Breaks”, Rench presents a masterful treatise that ties the sincerity and plaintiveness of classic honky-tonk with a hipster’s facility with irony and post-modern reference. It pulls in heavy beat samples and turntable scratching, twangy steel guitar, swampy delta blues, and contemplative folky understatement, and somehow it just works. This is a cosmopolitan incorporation of the best of America’s populist musical traditions, where the outlaw gunslinger is at home as a figure in the music of Bakersfield or the music of Bed-Stuy, and Rench’s take will provoke thought while getting your head bobbing.
This solo project highlights three up and coming vocalists. Amanda Neill (on Milwaukee Honeymoon, Forty Dollar Dress, and I Hope You Sing When I Die), Mamie Minch (Shootout) and Jessica Basta ( Hey Rattler).
From the turntable scratching pedal steel guitar sounds on ‘The Dust Up’, and beatboxing through the harmonica on ‘Boomerang’.”
The fingerprints of 70’s honky-tonk are all over the album, with heavy use of pedal steel guitar and Wurlitzer piano. But these adorn a collection of unmistakably twenty-first century songs. The songwriting brings the honky-tonk themes of outlaws and truckers into Brooklyn’s hipster bars and b-boy street corners, paired with the sampled beats of a producer who grew up in the age of hip-hop. What better way to embody Americana than to truly incorporate such quintessential influences as folk, country, soul, and hip-hop?
February 23rd, The hilarious video for his new single “Mugshot”, is part of the wave of sharing that will be unleashed by Thunderclap the day it goes live. By supporting the movement, fans will be part of the premiere announcement the moment it goes live and on the cutting edge of this new release as it makes its first step into the public.
