TRAMPLED BY TURTLES at Marquee Theatre

Duluth, MN’s Trampled by Turtles return to the West Coast supporting their breakout release, Palomino (Banjodad/Thirty Tigers). With a sound that’s a bracing hybrid of classic American songwriting, bluegrass and folk, this is forceful acoustic music from the land of ice and snow – of dark winters, isolation and numbing cold – delivered at breakneck pace with the fervor of religion.

“Shooting sparks in the face of folk traditionalism, the quintet approaches the banjo and mandolin with a level of brash recklessness hardly heard since the now-mythical reign of Uncle Tupelo. Bill Monroe and Joe Strummer would both be proud.” – SF BAY GUARDIAN
“One of very few bands in America that are hipster-approved but could heave a room of strangers into a hoe-down at any time…” – CITY PAGES (Minneapolis/St. Paul)

Duluth, MN’s Trampled by Turtles released their latest studio record, Palomino (Banjodad/Thirty Tigers), on April 10, 2010 and since then it’s spent 68 consecutive weeks on both the Billboard Bluegrass Chart Top 10 and Heatseakers Chart top 200. Trampled by Turtles’ blend of dazzling speedgrass coupled with thoughtful, Townes Van Zant-esque ballads launched them from hometown phenomenon to national status. With a sound that’s a bracing hybrid of classic American songwriting, bluegrass and folk, this is forceful acoustic music from the land of ice and snow – of dark winters, isolation and numbing cold – delivered at breakneck pace with the fervor of religion.

The five members of what would become Trampled by Turtles formed in 2003 in Duluth, Minnesota, the Great Lakes port town that had spawned slowcore pioneers Low a decade earlier. Down in the “The Cities” (Minneapolis and St. Paul to the rest of the world), such fabled Minnesota brethren as Dylan through to the Jayhawks had raised the bar pretty damn high, songcraft-wise. Within this contained music scene, the future members of TxT did their time in punk and rock and roll bands, brandishing their electricity proudly, before going “organic” with acoustic instruments.

While they never set out to be a “bluegrass” band, the band employs the same time-honored tools of the trade – guitar, acoustic bass, banjo, mandolin and fiddle – as their ‘grass-fed country cousins. But their soul-deep differences in influences, attitude and attack, from their quicksilver, deadly accurate picking to their lonesome, hauntingly spare ballads, make for a very different musical beast indeed.

The result of this pan-genre spot-welding is a sort of North Country & Mid-Western Blue-collar ’grass meets Basement Tapes-era The Band (unplugged!) with a fistful of gunpowder tossed into the wood-burning stove, all of which is permeated by a poignant, seductive desolation that hails from the likes of Townes Van Zandt (a favorite of Simonett’s) on up through current artists such as the Avett Brothers, Blitzen Trapper, Bill Callahan and Justin Vernon.
Ages: This event is all ages