At their best, Nashville's
Kopecky Family Band
(a family in the broader sense, as in a close circle of friends) generate a majestic, heavenly kind of sunshine pop folk with horns and cellos and bright, melodic harmonies, all driven by sharp, inventive drums and percussion and plenty of jangling electric guitars. The band has released three previous EPs, but
Kids Raising Kids
is the first full-length, and the first for the band since signing with
ATO Records
. This isn't one's typical Nashville fare -- the album sounds more like a cross between California pop and British Invasion, with a hefty dose of
Byrdsian
folk-rock guitars, heavily echoed vocals, and nary a drawl in sight. The addition of horns and cello in the band, and even lap steel guitar now and then, means these guys (and girl) have a wide sonic palette to work with, and on songs like the gorgeous "Wandering Eyes," which opens with a boozy horn section before gracefully erupting into a pop/rock gem that would make the angel band proud, and the bright, bouncing "Hope," which has a similarly majestic pop tone, this is an outfit to be reckoned with. Not everything on
hits that level, though, and despite the sheer diversity of sounds available to the band and the fact that they admirably explore that diversity in the arrangements, some of these songs are not rescued from the second tier. In all,
feels like half a great album of soaring 21st century folk-pop and half just a good-to-OK album of inventively generic 21st century folk-pop. One gets the feeling that
the Kopecky Family Band
's next album could well be a stunner. The talent and vision are clearly there. ~ Steve Leggett