One of the many tasty weekends in New Orleans had an excellent musical beginning on Friday Night November 9th as the ragged rockers Morning 40 Federation took their dirty Bywater based tunes uptown to kick-start this year’s Oak Street PoBoy Festival at the Maple Leaf Bar.
The brown bag clenching crew have been at this for a long time now and while the group (Josh Cohen – Saxophone, Ryan Scully – Guitar, Bailey Smith – Guitar, Steve Calandra – Bass, Rick Hukill – Tuba/Trombone, Mike Andrepont – Drums) have aged and the shows mellowed from the blazingly raucous, gloriously sloppy all-nighter’s of the turn of the millennium, the band has managed to tighten their sound and focus their energy into their drunk rock excursions with precision and power.
On this surprisingly cold fall night, the group took the stage in hats to keep warm but the dancing crowd got sweaty early on as “Gin Instead of Whiskey” blared out to the receptive audience. The 40’s got their full slamming sound in motion with the screeching “Headlamp” before the sexual hip thrusting started onstage and around the bar for “Toodle My Hukill”.
The band put its megaphone and screaming vocals to the forefront as “Frenchy”, “Jimmy Cousins” and “Intuition Son” were full on calliope/cacophony of sounds with “Intuition Son” in particular finding Scully psychotically jumping/failing around the stage propelling the band through heavy grooves, wrapping up wondering why the 40’s are never asked to play Children Benefits?
After taking a break in 2009 the band has recently worked on new material and a few of these songs were played on this night, fitting in perfectly with their well-worn material. Everyone loves “Chili Cheese Fries” and the crowd seemed to eat up the jam even more than usual, while “White Powder” found the fellows firing on all cylinders.
The over two-hour strong set had plenty of highlights, personal favorites were the raging “Gotta Nickle” which bled directly into the filthy sex groove of “Chew It” before the awesome noise rock blasting riffs of “God Help Me”. When the group finally wrapped up the long night with “Dumpster Juice” it was apparent that becoming grown-ups and (slightly) respectable has not diminished their style in the slightest, they are stronger sounding than ever.
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Nice write up of one of my favorite live bands in the world