Carbon Leaf with Alternate Routes
When: 7 p.m. Friday
Where: 9:30 Club, 815 V St., NW, Washington
Info: $20; 800-955-5566; tickets.com
If you’ve been feeling blue about sparse holiday weekend plans, make sure your dance card is open Friday evening when two of the hottest this-close-to-major-headliners bands with new releases come to town.
Carbon Leaf, the rootsy rock band, and Alternate Routes, alt rockers with classic rock tones, will share a bill at D.C.’s 9:30 Club for what will arguably be one of the hottest shows of the month.
“It will be interesting to know what people think,” said vocalist Barry Privett of the new album “Nothing Rhymes with Woman.” “I really am happy with way it turned out É but we hadn’t written songs like “Cinnamindy” before. It’s a different style but it still sounds like us.”
Since the band’s 2004 major label debut “Indian Summer” it was almost easy for the members to forget what “us” was, so busy were they touring in support of the album. A year spent regrouping and writing gave the band some fresh perspective. The result is an album destined to become a rock/folk classic, with emotionally brilliant lyrics accompanied by innovative guitar work as evidenced on “Cinnamindy,” “Seed,” and other tracks.
“We didn’t record until we had enough songs, until it was time to record,” said lead guitarist Eric Donnelly. “And we learned a lot in the process; we got back to the joy of recording and were able to dig a little deeper than we did before.”
After comparisons to The Fray, Toad the Wet Sprocket and other alt rockers, Alternate Routes further expanded its sound on the recently released “A Sucker’s Dream.”
“Any and all comparisons are welcome,” said Donnelly. “That’s the nature of this business, but when we were in the studio with Jay Joyce, our producerÉhe egged us on with an album a little bit different that what we’d done before.”
The new album is a bit edgier with more range than the previous Alternate Routes’s work.
“The pop mentality is still a part of the music,” Donnelly said. “But now we have five guys coming into their own as far as writing and recording. That’s a good thing for the end product.”
That’s because the more an artist can follow personal preferences and goals, the truer the sound. That was true of Carbon Leaf, too, whose fans are giving rave reviews to some of the new songs they’ve heard in concert.
“It’s important to really not be gunshy about harkening back to that kind of ‘anything goes’ mentality,” said Privett. “We just want to try things. We are really trying to write for ourselves again.”
