Larry and His Flask

It’s a tale as old as Alternative Press; a band spends years flailing about in the Punk trenches because that’s where the parties are sweatiest and best, until they tire of three chords and the mosh and reinvent themselves as a full throttle, hellbent-for-the-cheap-seats Country/Roots/Folk outfit.

So it was for Redmond, Ore., troupe Larry and His Flask (there is no actual Larry but it’s a safe bet that there are several real flasks). Assembled nearly a decade ago by the brothers Marshall, LAHF expanded to a sextet in 2008, picked up acoustic instruments and jumped the tracks toward a Twangcore sound, playing every dicey gig that was offered to them in order to spread their new wild gospel. By sheer happenstance, the Flask was home when the Dropkick Murphys needed an opener; the Beantown Celts were so impressed they invited the Flask to join them on their impending East Coast/Midwest bacchanal.
 
The Flask’s first full-length studio foray since dipping their Punk toes in the Country pool, last year’s All That We Know, was a careening, carousing runaway train car of adrenalized Folk balladry and shell-shocked Country shitkickery. And if you’re tooling around the city and see a semi-motley group raising a metric ton of musical hell on a random street corner for spare change, that’s Larry and His Flask — they’ll still busk for gas money.