AUGUST 2008 ONLINE EDITORIALS

Finders and Youngberg - Keep Your Suitcase Packed

By Nathan Harper

With a sound that’s either straight off the farm or gallivanting about the honky-tonk, Finders and Youngberg embrace the sounds of Americana on their debut record, Keep Your Suitcase Packed. Though the album is their fist release as a group, its energetic and easy sound reveals the members large body of previous experience.

Comprised of two married couples, Mike and Amy Finders, and Aaron and Erin Youngberg - yes, phonetically, they have the same name – the Youngbergs worked extensively with Front Range favorites The Billy Pilgrims, and the Finders were familiar faces on the bluegrass scene in their native Iowa before the couples decided to team up in Colorado. The end product of their time spent in the hollers of American music is hyper-dactyl banjo picking and exquisite vocal melodies that occasionally slow down into lonelier numbers that still maintain the group’s quality musical craftsmanship.

As the group’s primary lyricist Mike Finders captures the Americana milieu well, however, he can be rural to a fault. When evoking the tall prairie grass or wild, flowing rivers of the countryside he succeeds, but on tracks like “Broke Down Daddy Blues,” or it’s brethren “Ball and Chain Blues,” his lyrics sound like they were lifted from a Jeff Foxworthy routine. For the warm-canned-beer crowd this may in fact be fine, but for more cosmopolitan city types, it could be a little too much. Some hick schmaltz aside, Keep Your Suitcase Packed should allow Finders and Youngberg to fit comfortably into Northern Colorado’s burgeoning Bluegrass scene.