The Record Company
When it’s Grammy-nominated trio The Record Company, who are making some of the most commanding new noises in blues rock, with fiery live shows to match, then yes.
Meet the Grammy-nominated trio who are making some of the most commanding new noises in blues rock.
Indianapolis is known for car racing, being the birthplace of writer Kurt Vonnegut and… well, not much else. Being something of a cultural vacuum sitting between the Midwest and the American South, one thing it’s not famous for is rock’n’roll. Yet today, a hot, humid afternoon in June, the city’s White River State Park will fill with more than 6,000 people who will come here to watch two bands. One is R&B chart toppers Nathaniel
Rateliff And The Night Sweats, the other is The Record Company.
Chris Vos, The Record Company’s frontman, surveys the scene at the park from under trees as Classic Rock’s photographer snaps away. A short, black-capped bear of a guy with a Johnny Cash-deep voice, Vos has the look of someone ready to join the crew lugging kit around – who might also be writing a novel on the side.
“I grew up in the middle of nowhere in a little teeny place in Wisconsin,” he recalls, “and I made a promise to myself, when I was fourteen years old, that I wouldn’t go anywhere that my guitar didn’t take me first. And I stuck to that pretty closely.”
For the farmer-turned-singer/guitarist, who upped sticks and moved to Los Angeles in 2010 (after his wife got a job there), that promise is now paying off. Since Vos co-formed The Record Company with two fellow non-LA natives in 2011, his guitar has taken him to New York’s famed Madison Square Garden (supporting John Mayer), high-profile TV appearances and the 2016 Grammys, The Record Company’s debut Give It All Back having been nominated for Best Contemporary Blues Album.
The first time we saw the band they were opening for Blackberry Smoke at a sold-out London Forum, where they connected with the audience far more swiftly and profoundly than support acts are supposed to – especially on their first visit to the country. It proved to be a shortlived high, however.
“We went from that gig, which was all fists up in the air, to a three-week tour of Poland,” bassist Alex Stiff says in distinctive Philadelphia tones. “So one minute you’re playing the Forum, then about nine hours later you have a six-a.m. flight and you’re lugging your gear down into a small basement holding about seventeen people. Those kind of moments keep you humble. And we did have fun doing both.”
At first glance, The Record Company look like any regular trio of young-ish guys peddling blues-based rock’n’roll. There are those who’ll shriek at this; blokes in black! With a sort of hipster ish band name! Playing another ‘reinvention’ of the blues!
But in reality almost everything about them is slightly unexpected. Live shows are far wilder than their composed pictures suggest. None of them have ever played in covers bands, and the only non-original in their repertoire today is a Beastie Boys song (Sabotage). And the music? Instead of tired rehashes of bluesy or southern cliches, it’s feral screams of lap-steel, catchy
“This is a great job, you should have to suffer to get it.”
Chris Vos