Railroad Earth: Elko : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

In 2003, a reader, Michael Moran, sent a letter encouraging me to check out the New Jersey bluegrass-jam band Railroad Earth, along with a pair of live gigs on CD-R to get me started. I never got around to replying but took his advice. I enjoyed the group's 2002 and 2004 studio albums, Bird in the House and The Good Life, though not to the point of overjoy because there wasn't enough of the sprinting-improv verve of those concert discs. That jump and sparkle are all over Elko, an official double live set combining the genre purity of Jerry Garcia's 1975 mountain-music project, Old and in the Way, with the elastic instrumental alchemy of the Grateful Dead. The songs, all written or co-written by singer-guitarist Todd Sheaffer, answer the age-old Deadhead question -- how would Bill Monroe have covered the Dead's American Beauty? -- while mandolinist John Skehan, fiddler Tim Carbone and multi-instrumentalist Andy Goessling fill the luxuriant space in "Head" and "Like a Buddha" with bright four-way interplay. It took a while, but Railroad Earth -- and Michael Moran -- finally have the review they deserve.