Bloomington, Indiana’s is touring in support of their soon-to-be-released fifth studio album, “Good Morning, Magpie,” but the band fortunately didn’t bog down their Friday night show at with a bunch of new songs no one’s heard yet. In fact, the band played a chronologically diverse set that hit the best songs from each of their albums.
Someone not familiar with the band might think the sound they produce is a lot harder and lyrics they sing a lot more sinister than the name implies. Yes, there are songs about zombies and some centered around a storyline involving the devil in Mexico, but it’s done in an amusing, tongue-in-cheek way. The majority of Murder by Death’s set list, as well as discography, is made up of songs about drinking — primarily whiskey.
Every song throughout the evening contained some combination of the basic guitar, bass and drums, but the band also prominently features keyboard solos (in a key which makes them sound like they were stolen out of an old western saloon) and cello solos by Sarah Balliet, which garnered the largest and most vociferous reactions.
Murder by Death has toured before with footage from over-the-top, black and white, campy B-horror movies projected onto a screen behind the stage. Friday night they did not resort to such theatrics, instead letting their instruments — and frontman Adam Turla’s unique and distinctly baritone voice — do the entertaining.
The simpler stage set up actually led to a better overall show. There were no scenes of claymation skeletons eliciting forced and unauthentic screams out of a damsel playing in the background to distract from the actual concert. The theatrics, which this time were only the standard changing and dimming of lights, put the focus more on the band, which was a good thing.
Southern Missouri rubes (said not as a pejorative, but endearingly) opened for Murder by Death. It took the late-arriving Cervantes crowd awhile to finally get into Ha Ha Tonka’s set, but when the audience fell for this band they fell hard. The band won the crowd over when they played a spot on cover of Ram Jam’s “Black Betty” as their penultimate song — and also found a way to seamlessly weave in lyrics from John Denver’s “Rocky Mountain High” between Ha Ha Tonka’s own original verses during their final song.
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Andrew Brand is a Denver-based writer and a regular contributor to Reverb.
Joe McCabe is a Denver photographer and a regular contributor to Reverb. Check out his .
