River Liver
When you’re in a band, things happen. You lose a bass player. Or your drummer threatens to quit. Or your marriage turns into a train wreck, and making music for a living seems like financial suicide.
But No River City, Atlanta’s finest countrified rock band, has survived all of the above — though at the additional price of its cello player, who, during the band’s most dysfunctional moments, left for graduate school.
“Jacy Farrow” by No River City, from Wolves & Fishes:
Spinning coarse, beautiful tapestries of melancholy with a ragged touch and a clear voice, Drew de Man started the band as a duo, had an existential crisis, then watched his handiwork nose-dive. Now, after transforming No River City into a rambunctious quintet that didn’t last, he has again resurrected his act in a blaze of creative glory and sheer willpower.
The last time that No River City hit Lawrence, opening for Mason Jennings at the Bottleneck, there were only two people in the band. This time, a four-piece No River plans to get intimate, crowding a private residence with goodness and beer at a house downtown that the locals call Green Warren Studio, for its, um, greenness.
Sound questionable? In an e-mail to the Pitch, de Man offers five reasons that you should venture an appearance at this window-rattling, wood-floor-scratching twang of a party.
5. “It’s Friday. You’re ready to give up. So are we. Relax. We’re all born to suffer. No River City helps it look prettier.”
4. “It’s Kansas. Drew de Man loves to be in Kansas. No kidding. I once heard him exclaim, while passing Cassoday, the Prairie Chicken Capital of the World, ‘This place beats Costa Rica, Paris and even New York!'”
3. “The band almost didn’t make it. (Seriously, they almost fucking quit last week.)”
2. “You’ve never heard such rock without a bass player.”
1. “Two sets of sheer sonic opium — makes you feel good and takes you places.”
And if we might recommend a reason of our own: At this gig, $3 gets you a bottomless cup of beer. Get on up to the house.
