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 recently released “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.

Trampled by Turtles is Dave Simonett (guitar), Tim Saxhaug (bass), Dave Carroll (banjo), Erik Berry (mandolin), and Ryan Young (fiddle). They call Duluth, MN home, but have spent the last five years taking this music across the country, playing in venues ranging from raging basement parties to places like The Great American Music Hall in San Francisco and New York’s Bowery Ballroom. Finding their appeal extended beyond the traditional “bluegrass crowd”, they’ve opened for and toured with the likes of Low, Cracker, Camper Van Beethoven, and Pedro the Lion. They have also found a loyal following at festivals such as 10,000 Lakes, Wakarusa, Rothbury, and Pickathon. With most of the material recorded live in the studio, the album takes on the quality of a live show, with minimal and tasteful production.

The five members of what would become Trampled by Turtles formed in 2003 in Duluth, 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.

Crisply produced by TxT lead singer, guitarist and primary songwriter Simonett, Palomino leads off with a pair of plaintive, up-tempo ballads. “Wait So Long” offers gorgeous, high lonesome harmonies by bassist Saxhaug and banjoist Carroll. Check out the video above.

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Images Via: Myspace