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Whether traveling to gigs on horseback or by tour bus, Americana mavens The Brothers Comatose forge their own path with raucous West Coast renderings of traditional bluegrass, country and rock ‘n’ roll music. The five-piece string band is anything but a traditional acoustic outfit with their fierce musicianship and rowdy, rock concert-like shows.
The Brothers Comatose is comprised of brothers Ben Morrison (guitar, vocals) and Alex Morrison (banjo, vocals), Scott Padden (bass, vocals), Philip Brezina (violin), and Greg Fleischut (mandolin). When they’re not headlining The Fillmore for a sold-out show or appearing at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival, the band is out on the road performing across America, Canada, Australia, and hosting their very own music festival, Comatopia, in the Sierra foothills.
With a talent for crafting vivid, three-dimensional narrators and slice-of-life tales set in forgotten places, Vinocur has made a name for himself as a songwriter’s songwriter: a modern musician with an old soul’s gift for storytelling. A versatile performer and nearly lifelong guitarist — at age 15, obsessed with Jimi Hendrix, he sold his Magic cards to buy a Fender Stratocaster — Vinocur is best known for his work as a co-frontman of the acclaimed Americana band Goodnight, Texas; for his poignant blues-folk solo records; and, increasingly over the past two years, as an occasional collaborator and live background vocalist/mandolin player for Metallica. (His songs have also made appearances in places like the opening credits to Tiger King, the Academy Award-winning documentary Free Solo, Coors commercials, and Major League Baseball games. Vinocur has performed the National Anthem before the first pitch three times.)
Hindsight, Vinocur’s third full-length solo record, was released February 12, 2021. Written in the months after the pandemic shuttered the live music industry, it finds the songwriter staring down a year without a tour, adjusting to a life of staying put — and letting his imagination out to run. On Hindsight, Vinocur drops in on various lovers, castaways and vagabonds, then brings them to life through quiet moments and lonely spaces, effortlessly weaving together the personal, the historical and the fictional. The listener is transported instantly: A wooden house haunted by broken promises; a rusted truckbed covered in frost; morning light hitting empty beer bottles on the bedside table in a cheap motel. Elsewhere, Vinocur draws inspiration from John Prine and Justin Townes Earle, two venerable songwriters taken too soon in the tumult of 2020.
Recorded entirely on Vinocur’s iPhone in his apartment in San Francisco’s Sunset District, Hindsight echoes the intimate, demo-type sound of records by the Mountain Goats, Field Medic, or Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska. It also feels a bit like rediscovering a cassette mixtape from a friend in an old glove compartment. All told, it captures the year that was — raw with anger and loss, determination and hope — and adds the quiet comfort of shared solitude: a message in a bottle, a voice through the static, a passed note from a songwriter’s quarantined living room to yours.