The Kickback melts an outdoor patio with 'Rube.'

The Kickback

I keep meaning to write a proper review of The Kickback’s Weddings & Funerals, but each time I was going to try and tie it to one of their shows, said show would get canceled. As I’m sure singer Billy Yost would say, “What did you expect?” Since it’s definitely one of my favorite albums of the year I guess I’ll finally get to write a capsule review of it when it inevitably ends up on my “best of” 2017 list in the next week or so.

I mean the furthest I got was a blurb back in May reading:

The new music finds frontman Billy Yost processing his recent divorce, and the result is an album of sometimes harrowing but always excellent work. It also sees the band as a whole pushing their sound in new directions without abandoning the left-of-center hooks and melodic sensibility that made us fall in love with them. Misery rarely sounds this entertaining, and we like it.

Here’s a live rendition of the band preforming “Rube” on the patio of Parson’s Chicken and Fish. Which, of all the things I’ve seen the band do over the years, might be is definitely one of the weirdest settings I’ve ever seen them play.

It could have been painfully awkward, but Yost and the band manage to mentally transport themselves to another space entirely and rip out a searing version of a song that already started of as scalding. I've been playing the album an awful lot lately for personal reasons, and it still stands up just as powerfully as it did the first time I heard it, so you should probably pick up your own copy if you haven't already.



[h/t CoS]