the hum / By Bob Doran

Do People Still Want Albums?

The Brothers Comatose answer, plus a Tuesday roots explosion, ALO, Groundation and “world” music

(Feb. 2, 2012) The Brothers Comatose really are brothers — well, two of them anyway. In the beginning, the self-described “raucous and rowdy” stringband from San Francisco was Ben and Alex Morrison, a couple of Petaluma boys who grew up in a folky household.

“Our dad had guitars, so we’d always played guitars, then one of my mom’s friends left a banjo behind,” Ben recalled. “Alex was maybe 13 at the time. He took to the banjo.” A friend at school, Gio Benedetti, played bass and joined the stringy fun. “That was when things took a left turn and we started down that road. We spent a lot of time fooling around, jamming before we got a band together.”

The Brothers Comatose

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Fast-forward about a decade and a half and the bros are still picking out tunes with Gio, with a fiddle and mandolin added to the mix. You might have heard them at last summer’s Jefferson State Old Time Review at the Playhouse or some other local show. That’s where I picked up Songs from the Stoop, a nice set of tunes they put together while living in a Victorian on Haight Street.

A second CD is almost done with a bunch of songs about life on the road — the band is on the road a lot. While they’ve already put a lot of time and money into recording, last week the Brothers posed a question to fans who follow them via Twitter and Facebook: “Do people want albums from bands anymore, or would you rather just have songs come out as they’re written and recorded … like a more constant stream?”

The response was almost unanimous: “Yes! We want albums!” even if many will simply transfer the music to a computer.

“We have such a constant stream of information in our culture today,” said Ben. “Some people check Facebook and Twitter every 10 minutes. Some bands wait a long time between albums and people maybe forget about them until there’s something new. We’ve had these songs for a while, but you have to wait until you have enough, and it takes time to record them and mix them and press them, and it all costs money, just so people can put the songs on their iPod. We like the old school approach — we’re all record collectors and we like the aesthetic beauty of a tangible object — but at the same time, maybe people want something new every month or two from their favorite band. I’m still torn.” And since there’s already much invested in the as-yet-untitled new album, the bros are pushing forward. But first the Brothers C are hitting the road. The band plays Humboldt Brews Friday with Portland’s Water Tower Bucket Boys sharing the bill. Be sure to stop at that merch table.

There’s “stormy Monday” — so, maybe this coming Tuesday could be dubbed rootsy Tuesday. Laid-back Americana guitar slinger Jackie Greene (who looks more and more like Dylan as time passes) straddles the blues, folk and jam scenes. His most recent disc, Till the Light Comes, was produced in part by Tim Bluhm of The Mother Hips. Jackie hits HumBrews with like-minded Boston-based singer/songwriter Jabe Beyer.

Meanwhile at the Van Duzer, next-gen blues queen Ruthie Foster brings her Soul Salvation Tour to town with Paul Thorn, an alt. Americana songwriter out of Tupelo, Miss.

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