• Home
  • About
    • CultureCrash: The Blog
    • Culture Crash: The Book
    • Scott Timberg
    • Contact
  • Culture Crash: The Book
    • Culture Crash: The Book
    • Book Events
  • Other AJBlogs
  • ArtsJournal

CultureCrash

Scott Timberg on Creative Destruction

Folk Duo The Milk Carton Kids

May 10, 2013 by Scott Timberg

YOUR humble blogger caught a very good show at Largo last night by the LA folk duo The Milk Carton Kids. I’ve dug their Gillian Welch/Dave Rawlings-like songs on their recordings — their mix of old-time vocal harmonies, smooth melodies, and bits of guitar dissonance — but the show took it all to a higher level. (Others will hear the Everly Bros or early Simon and Garfunkel.)

Beautiful ingredients: The between-song banter was somewhere between Richard Thompson and improv comedy, and the guitars were a ’50s Gibson and Martin. (Not sure why THIS isn’t coming up, but it’s one of my favorite songs of theirs — try it.)

I say all this not just because these guys — whose new record, The Ash & Clay, is recently out on Anti — are like a younger/cuter/more talented version of Slowpoke, the acoustic duo I was once in.

Don’t take my word for it — Joe Henry likes em, too.

As strong as the show was, I would have liked to see them encore with a cover — Townes? Scud Mountain Boys? Delmores? — or bring onstage Punch Brother Chris Thile, the godlike mandolin player who the Kids sometime open for. Their style is very sharply worked out, but I’d like to see an occasional wrench thrown in to get them moving a bit.

Also enjoyed the opener, a band of very young Tennessee kids called the Barefoot Movement, playing spirited old-time music on guitars, mandolin and double bass.

I’ll be keeing my eyes and ears peeled for the Milk Carton Kids.

Filed Under: folk music, indie, largo, Los Angeles, west coast

Scott Timberg

I'm a longtime culture writer and editor based in Los Angeles; my book "CULTURE CRASH: The Killing of the Creative Class" came out in 2015. My stories have appeared in The New York Times, Salon and Los Angeles magazine, and I was an LA Times staff writer for six years. I'm also an enthusiastic if middling jazz and indie-rock guitarist. (Photo by Sara Scribner) Read More…

Culture Crash, the Book

My book came out in 2015, and won the National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Award. The New Yorker called it "a quietly radical rethinking of the very nature of art in modern life"

I urge you to buy it at your favorite independent bookstore or order it from Portland's Powell's.

Culture Crash

Here is some information on my book, which Yale University Press published in 2015. (Buy it from Powell's, here.) Some advance praise: With coolness and equanimity, Scott Timberg tells what in less-skilled hands could have been an overwrought horror story: the end of culture as we have known … [Read More...]

Follow Me

Follow Us on TwitterFollow Us on RSSFollow Us on E-mail

Archives

@TheMisreadCity

Tweets by @TheMisreadCity
May 2013
M T W T F S S
 12345
6789101112
13141516171819
20212223242526
2728293031  
« Apr   Jun »

An ArtsJournal Blog

Recent Posts

  • Scott Timberg Has Passed Away
  • Ojai Music Festival and JACK Quartet
  • What’s in a Name?
  • Time Pauses For Valentin Silvestrov
  • The Perverse Imagination of Edward Carey

Copyright © 2025 · Magazine Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in