Three Stars February is rounding the finish line, just in time for you to take all that local music yearning to Unbuckled tonight. On Tuesday we visited with The Hint, yesterday The Apparitions, and today we finish with Shortstack. See you all tonight at DC9!

Shortstack play music they love. They are not a political band. They do not play art rock, or at least what you would expect to hear if provided the term. And there ain’t no indie rock ‘round here. They are a band influenced by traditional American country music. Call it avant-garde country, if you require a tag. This band does not particularly like labels.

The group was formed in Arlington, VA in the winter of 2000 by rhythm guitarist and lead vocalist Adrian Carroll and drummer Scott Gursky, when the two high school friends and former bandmates moved to metro Washington after college. Carroll, bored with contemporary indie and punk music, was drawn to the virtuosic elements of Chet Atkins and Merle Travis, and soon began writing original music with Gursky. The duo became Shortstack, a name inspired by a Hank Williams lyric, and their formula was simple: to capture the instrumentation of these classic country rockers while updating it with a modern rhythm section and contemporary lyric style. Upright bassist Michael Pahn soon joined the group, bringing his own passion for country music. The sound was completed with innovative lap-steel guitarist Mike Maran, who was replaced in 2005 by native D.C. musician Burleigh Seaver.

We caught Shortstack’s headlining set at the Black Cat a couple weeks ago, and let it be known -- country music this is not. Lead singer Adrian Carroll calmly takes the stage and plays sitting in a chair, keenly peering out at the audience from underneath his shaggy hair. To his left stands Pahn, supporting an upright bass nearly twice his size. Behind him is Gursky, wearing a soft smile behind a simple drum kit. And to his right sits Seaver, tending the lap steel. It is a deceptively intimate stage setting -- you feel like they’re setting up to play in your house. The Black Cat crowd soon shakes as the band opens with ‘Wiseblood,’ a track off their soon-to-be-released second LP. Their country, er rockabilly, er, whatever is so driving that it forces you to move, whether or not you’re a dancer.

Quickly, you realize there is a paradox going on here: while you cannot stand still to their music, the band chooses to sit. Still, they emit plenty of energy from the stage. They resort to familiar territory on ‘Offer Still Stands,’ as Seaver’s lap-steel slides send chills up your spine. Carroll’s vocals are all whiskey and smokes. You feel like you are in the bar scene of a Tarantino flick and something big is about to go down. Perhaps this is the beauty of playing Americana roots-rock -- the music, through its alumni status, has been thrown at you so many times that it evokes a range of traditional imagery and feeling unlike any other genre of music.

Pahn’s bass shakes your body with each pluck of his finger. Gursky’s rapid tempo keeps your hips in perpetual motion. You bounce along Seaver’s melodic lines on the lap steel and get blown away when he redefines the instrument, ripping rhythm riffs more appropriate for a hard rock band. All the while, Carroll strums his guitar underneath his howling vocals, keeping a cool, confident watch over the audience.

Collectively, Shortstack is locked in tight precision all night and it’s clear that they truly enjoy playing their own brand of roots rock, masterfully tensioning their verses before bursting out with cathartic choruses. They complete the set with another new track, "House on Fire." Soon after their departure, the Cat crowd is barking for more. The fellas return after a short break and pick right back up with "Ace of Spades," as Seaver unleashes another round of shrilling steel slides. The boys finish us off with another new track, "Wreckin’ Ball." By the end of the night, we’ve danced off all that pregame whiskey. We leave the Cat exhausted, unable to take anymore music. Whatever you want to call it, we were rocked. And certainly, we will never, ever call them alt-country again.

Setlist:
Wiseblood
Offer Still Stands
Riverbend
Trouble in Mind
Make it a Good One
Closer to Being Apart
Tomorrow Never Comes
Nothing in this World Can Stop Me Worrying About that Girl
1000 Years of Steady Rain
Good Intentions
House on Fire
****
Ace of Spades
Wreckin Ball

Visit them at: http://www.shortstackmusic.com

See them next: Unfortunately, the band does not currently have any shows posted but are planning gigs in the near future. Check their MySpace page for updates.

Questions for Shortstack:

Who are your favorite local bands?

Burleigh: I’m a big fan of The Apes, I think they’re doing really interesting stuff.

Adrian: I’ll plug the other band I’m in, Pagoda.

Mike: Nethers.

Burleigh: The Cassettes.

Adrian: Benjy Ferree. He’s a wonderful songwriter.

Burleigh: Link Wray. He was from here and he was an amazing musician.

What do you like most about the D.C. music scene?

Burleigh: The scene is relatively small so everybody knows each other for the most part. You have a lot of contemporaries that you can bounce ideas off of and friends you can play with. There’s a lot of good feedback from people you know and respect.

Adrian: There are some decent venues here, like the Black Cat. Not many towns have a club that nice.

Mike: And the 9:30 Club. It’s an awesome place to play. They treat you well, it sounds good, and people are excited to come see you play.

And the least?

Mike: It makes me a little sad how expensive DC has become to live in because that really doesn’t foster a creative vibe. I used to live in a group house paying $200 in rent and I could focus all of my energy on being in a band. I learned to play my instrument that way. You’re not going to see that in DC anymore.

Adrian: It can lend itself to being a music scene, but you find in arts that it’s people who have a lot of money who are able to excel because you can devote a lot of time that you would be devoting to making money to put a roof over your head.

Mike: In the past 5 or 6 years it’s become a much less art-friendly town. The cost of living does not lend itself to being an artist.

How do you feel about being called an alt-country band?

Adrian: A lot of the alt-country stuff came out with people trying to ‘punkify’ Johnny Cash. And I guess you could call us that. But when we got started we were drawing from an older source of country -- more instrumental country and Merle Travis -- and trying to do something new with that.

Mike: People lump it in as alt-country, and that’s fine. But I think that stuff sounds more like singer/songwriter stuff and it’s not country the way I think country was meant to be. We heard some music that we really liked and seemed like it would be really fun to play. When people ask me what type of music we play, I tend to say we play rock music. I don’t find the term alt-country useful…it just doesn’t apply to us.

Burleigh: When I think of alt-country, I think of bands like Wilco that have a vaguely country feel to them. It’s not that we dislike that or don’t want to be a part of that, but we’re coming from a different place, and we sound different from [those bands]. I tend to say ‘early rock 'n' roll.’ We’re more rhythmically oriented than Wilco.

What about rockabilly?

Burleigh: I think rockabilly is probably the closest one, although I usually resist saying that one because people think of greasers and leather jackets…

Adrian: …and flames on your car.

So you’re influenced by country music, but how have you formed your own sound?

Adrian: There’s an extended bar in "Honky Tonkin’" by Hank Williams where the band just jams for a minute, and I always thought that was the seed of what we did. It stays on one chord and the steel guitar jams, and that was an idea for what we could do with Shortstack. Take the way people play those instruments and make it more chromatic…

Mike: …make it more our own.

Adrian: Mike [Maran] kind of approached the lap steel like heavy-metal guitar, playing it more like a rock instrument...

Mike:…he approached it as a rhythm instrument. If you listen to old country records like Hank Williams, it is an instrument which either carries the melody or implies chords, it’s never playing rhythm. Burleigh approaches it melodically but he’s still definitely not playing it in a traditional manner. He’s made it his own.

You have an authentic country vocal style. Can the same be said of your lyrics?

Adrian: No. I never got into music because I really wanted to write lyrics. I don’t mind doing it now but it’s definitely not in a country vein. When we started, I was unsure what we were trying to do, even lyrically. I guess things are more now personal experience; asking yourself what you’re doing at a particular point in your life where you’ve come from and what all that means.

Burleigh: Country lyrics tend to have a tone of ‘how did this happen,’ or ‘what did I do to deserve this?’. My take on Adrian’s lyrics is that they take those ideas, not the facts of the traditional themes, but the sentiments or the emotions behind them and place them in a different context.

Adrian: I think early on when I started learning to sing and play at the same time - - a skill I found very difficult to master - - I listened to and learned songs by Leadbelly, Woody Guthrie, the Carter Family, Bill Monroe, and Johnny Cash. I don't think I consciously tried to emulate any one of them, but I'm sure they all shaped the way I sing somehow.

Do you feel bound by the constriction of staying true to your influences?

Adrian: No, I feel like there’s still a lot of room for invention.

Burleigh: Every band ends up arriving at ‘what it means to be a Shorstack song.’ I write rock riffs where I’m like ‘that’s obviously not a Shortstack song.’ There are always self imposed limits in any art, but I don’t feel any constraints.

Adrian: The sky is the limit.

Photo taken from flickr user Capitol City Rock