If you’re starting with Nicki Bluhm & The Gramblers’ latest album, the just released Loved Wild Lost, you’ve been drawn into a Country/Roots/Pop/Rock maelstrom that suggests Grace Potter and the Nocturnals if they’d been raised on the Bakersfield sound and dreamy California Folk/Rock, translated with a contemporary ass-kick. You’d then work back to The Gramblers’ 2013 self-titled debut, which exhibits many of the same influences and extrapolations as Loved Wild Lost. And you’d run across the band’s “Van Sessions” on YouTube, where they film themselves playing cool acoustic covers while driving between gigs; my fave is their spin on Funkadelic’s “Can You Get to That,” but Daryl Hall and John Oates prefer their take on “I Can’t Go for That.”
Nicki Bluhm & The Gramblers play the Taft Theatre with Us Elevator 8 p.m. Wednesday. $15. Taft Theatre, 317 E. Fifth St., Downtown, tafttheatre.org.
This article appears in Apr 22-28, 2015.