Tangleweed - Acoustic Americana April 17, 2010

Tangleweed is a band of five forward-thinking musical reactionaries from Chicago, Illinois. While the band’s instrumentation is standard bluegrass, their music is anything but. With a repertoire both broad and deep, one listener described them as sounding like “a band playing on a pirate ship off the coast of New Orleans in the 1920s.”

The group has stayed true to its roots while evolving and expanding its repertoire over the years. The group’s first CD, Just a Spoonful (and Other Folksongs of Rural Cook County), was recorded in a makeshift studio with vintage analog equipment and a setup modeled after the early field recordings that inspired the band. Their second CD, Where You Been So Long, retained their live energy while covering a broader swath of American music with original songs mixed with classic bluegrass, old-time country, Irish fiddle tunes, rockers, and mountain music. The third and most recent CD, Most Folk Heroes Started Out as Criminals, retains 100% acoustic instrumentation, but is varied with the addition of the erhu, autoharp, tenor guitar, and accordion. The result is the representation of the past and future of string band music.
Tangleweed combines high-energy performances with impeccable musicianship and a wide breadth of influences to create a unique sound that is simultaneously modern and old-timey. The band has been hailed in reviews worldwide as a welcome breath of fresh air for lovers of stomping string band music and high lonesome harmonies. www.Tangleweed.org