Escondido Album Release Show w/Bryan Cates: at The High Watt (Nashville, TN) Fri. March 1, 2013

Escondido Album Release Show w/Bryan Cates

Pop/Rock

Nashville Scene Critic's Pick …

In the grand scheme of Nashville’s musical history, it’s nothing new for performers to draw looks, sounds or scenery from way out west. I mean, this was never exactly range-riding, cattle-roping Cowboy Central, but generations’ worth of stage costumes contributed to the current tourist-friendly availability of straw hats and leather boots on Lower Broad. Escondido — a duo made up of formerly solo singer-songwriters Tyler James and Jessica Maros — have found their muse in sleepy ’70s desert country-rock. Reverb plays a big role on their debut album, The Ghost of Escondido, enveloping their serene harmonizing, tele and steel guitar and the occasional spaghetti Western trumpet lick in a cavernous mystique. One of the tracks — the coolly detached rockabilly tune “Don’t Love Me Too Much” — was featured on an episode of Nashville last month. But the song that really planted the seed for Maros and James’ collaboration — during somebody else’s recording session, no less — was “Rodeo Queen,” a romantic daydream set in wide open Wrangler country.

—JEWLY HIGHT