I saw two great shows this weekend, both of which relied pretty heavily on lap steels for their sounds.  Maybe it was a coincidence… or maybe the lap steel’s making a comeback.  Are lap steels the new violins/recorders of indy music?

I saw Baton Rouge based Cohen and the Ghost this Friday at Wonderroot.  They have a pretty good setup - guitar, bass, violin, drums, and a second guitar.  But the second guitarist switches between instruments almost every song, going from guitar to mandolin to another guitar to lap steel.  I hadn’t thought about this before seeing Cohen and the Ghost, but the lap steel produces a sound pretty similar to a short violin note.  As Cohen and the Ghost’s violinist and lap steel players worked, their sounds tended to overlap, producing this musical hybrid instrument that really blew me away.

I wandered into A Fight to the Death’s Saturday album release party by mistake.  They were playing The Highland Inn’s cavernous Ballroom Lounge, a place I tend to associate more with DJ sets and weekend jazz than A Fight to the Death’s wierd rock mix of Americana and Western-strained melodies.  (I didn’t realize this until checking out their myspace page just now, but A Fight to the Death actually use the pedal steel guitar, an instrument I’d never seen in person before, though I’ve probably heard it on Calexico’s albums.)  Anyway, they played a really great set, and totally transformed my opinion of the Ballroom Lounge.