Tylor & The Train Robbers – Live

Tylor Ketchum’s country rock band is based in Boise, Idaho up toward the Canadian border. It’s around here that the band tours bringing their tight and pulsating rhythms to some original lyrics. For those unfamiliar with their sound then The Byrds, The Flying Burrito Brothers and a little Tom Petty comes to mind. If you like your rock guitars then fill your boots. One of my eternal regrets after becoming aware of their catalogue was finding that I was two weeks early to a gig according to a bill poster I saw in Jackson, Wyoming. For all that this live recording compensates as the band work through 23 songs mainly from their four studio long player releases.

The hiring of Adam Odor to produce is a masterstroke. Odor’s been behind the desk on the Silverada and Mike & The Moonpies releases. All those releases ‘sing’ and, not least, because Odor finds the instruments behind the vocalist and promotes them into a palpitating rhythm with pedal steel and lead guitar always doing something interesting. The band have some killer cuts including The Of Ballad Black Jack Ketchum, a seven minute epic about a relative from the 1800s who was hung after a career of robbing banks and trains. This is followed by the title of their 2021 album Non-Typical Find, where a sun’s glint off a rib cage draws, way down in a valley, a walker to find a human skeleton and the tragic story of the woman’s demise after some perilous and then fatal hitchhiking.

The band keep it interesting with changes in pace between songs and I Got You starts with harmonica and some picking by Antonio Vazquez to a rhythm where you could imagine the audience dancing. Sat on a galloping drum beat Ketchum’s nasal tones advise that he and ‘his baby’ are Good At Bad News with sparkling pedal steel from Rider Soran that appears like shards of sunlight appearing between trees as you pass by them at speed. Hum Of The Road, another album title track enjoys harmonies on the chorus as Ketchum’s brothers, Tommy Bushman, on drums and Jason Ketchum on bass propel from the back of the stage. There are a handful of covers and the most attractive is Feel A Whole Lot Better from The Byrds where Soran and Vazquez exchange licks and the brothers lean in to provide harmonies behind Ketchum.

This is a long album with maybe too many tracks but it’s a reward for a loyal following who long wanted the live experience on record; for me it was time well spent.