Old Californio - Westering Again (2009)

Once the rhythm section of Drag City recording artist Elisa Randazzo’s former band Fairechild, bass player turned guitarist/lead singer Rich Dembowski and drummer/backing vocalist Justin Smith branched out to form Old Californio — a rootsy Los Angelino quartet specializing in the kind of harmonious, bygone folk-rock and West Coast canyon-twang pioneered by the Flying Burrito Brothers and the Grateful Dead’s two countrified albums of 1970. The bouncy “Mother Road” opens rocking like a harder Mother Hips tune with toneful Telecasters pumping through vintage tube-burning amplifiers and a groovy Hammond organ grinding under Dembowski’s slight nasal. Watery pedal steel notes melt all over the intro to “City Lines” as Dembowski continues on the theme of getting out of Dodge — this time around with his significant other — as a Fender Telecaster picks and bends like Clarence White-era Byrds. The band’s talent for pulling in the reins after jamming out into space is best exemplified in the family-man ballad “Mouths of Babes,” which incorporates some pump organ and mandolin.