Trampled By Turtles

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• Ross Morrison

With four self-released albums to their credit and a word-of-mouth reputation that draws legions of diehard fans to their must-see-to-believe live shows, northern roots music hybrid Trampled by Turtles are set to release 'Palomino', their first album through Thirty Tigers/RED, on April 13th, 2010. 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.