Tea Leaf Green Raise Up Tents and Revise Genres

By Andrew William Smith, Editor

September 4, 2008

For better or for worse, San Francisco-based Tea Leaf Green have built a career with a fanbase fully rooted in the jam band genre. With the band’s latest release on Surfdog Records—label to Brian Setzer, Gibby Haynes, and Slightly Stoopid—the ensemble has proven that, above all else, this is primarily, as a previous album-title claimed, a rock and roll band.

Called Raise Up The Tent, the disc delivers delicious anthems taken from a traveler’s notebook and transposed into tunes that belong on the playlist of many an alternative rock or college radio station. Bringing tight, tenacious tunes with tasty licks and irresistibly easy lyrics, Tea Leaf’s proper debt to the jamband scene seems more cultural than musical.

The benefits of jamband culture are numerous and include, among other things, a conscientious community of listeners committed to reporting setlists, taping shows, and traveling the byways to privilege live shows over anything else. But on disc, Tea Leaf Green give listeners addictive hooks and tight arrangements rooted in a pop sensibility of sing-a-long seductions.

While many artists have lobbied for the loving legacy left by the Dead, this band owns it with humility and finesse and funky friendliness. The longest song on this summer’s installment barely tops five minutes—the band can leave the jammy levity for the live shows.

Like the marvelous magic offered by My Morning Jacket, songs by Tea Leaf Green could fit many a historical reference in the reverence to rock’s most reliable stories. Having listened to Raise Up The Tent for weeks on end in anticipation of finally seeing the band in a headlining spot, I can say without reservation that these tracks are sweet-loving, late-summer trifles unto themselves, nuggets that load headphones for long walks and bike rides and morning rituals. Many days, I’ve had to listen to “Don’t Curse At The Night” and “Red Ribbons” repeatedly before I could ever tire of them, but each track has that same hookish, hopeful “hit” quality from front-end to boogie bottom.

Hungry and innocent, the songs give listeners in wide-eyed wonder what they lack in devilish details, something for majestic mountain-tops and mushy mornings-after. Fronted by Trevor Garrod on keyboards and vocals next to Josh Clark on guitar and vocals, this band shares with some of the greatest a collaborative ethos that transcends egos.

For decades, the traditional “rockist” groups have been living on “Borrowed Time,” waiting for another genre to replace the purity of perfect rock and roll. But Raise Up The Tent proves once again that the lease on grooving gravity will give good vibes for an endless soulful, setlist as long as artists like Tea Leaf Green keep turning it out.

Raise Up The Tent was released on July 22, 2008 on Surfdog Records. For more information, please visit http://www.tealeafgreen.com/