Music Band

From minimal equipment the Nashville three-piece Music Band generates forceful volume by leaning on classic rock riffs, power pop melodies and pacing, and a persistent thread of punk defiance. Underneath the plain-spoken rock & roll surface lie finer gradations that draw from Southern boogie rock, psychedelic art pop, and additional hues, all surfacing across their catalog beginning with the 2016 debut album Wake Up Laughing.

Early in the 2010s Nashville musicians Harry Kagan on guitar and vocals, drummer Lee Putney, and bassist Duncan Shea assembled Music Band. Their opening recordings arrived as the 2010 EP Wild at Heart, containing four gritty, lo-fi blues-rock numbers. A comparably unrefined full-length, Satan’s Grave, followed in 2012, while 2014 yielded both the concert document Live at Wembley and the brighter mini-album Can I Live. By then the trio was performing regularly and sharpening its approach. A 2016 run of shows alongside fellow Nashville rockers Diarrhea Planet coincided with a split 7", and that same year Music Band issued Wake Up Laughing, its first official studio album. Four years afterward the group returned with the second album Celebration, an additional tightening of its driving rock style.