The Sven Curth (huge) Trio Recorded a Live Album at Its Home Bar, and It Sounds Like It
Most live albums are recorded in rooms the band flies into. The Sven Curth (huge) Trio made theirs in the room they drink in. Live at Your Local Waterhole, released this year and captured on a warm August night at the Waterhole Music Lounge in Saranac Lake, is a hometown record in the most literal sense — you can practically hear the specific creak of the specific stage, the specific regulars yelling the specific requests. It is the least glamorous premise imaginable for a live album, and it is exactly why the thing works.
The trio is a Lake Placid–based project built around songwriter-guitarist Sven Curth, with Kyle Murray on drums and Colin Dehond on bass — a lean, blues-rock-leaning Americana outfit whose parenthetical "(huge)" is a good joke about a three-piece and also, on the record, a slightly-true one, because they play bigger than their number. Reviewers who caught the album out in the wider blogosphere described it as loose, lively, and "absolutely human," which is critic-speak for: they left the mistakes in, and the mistakes are the point. This is not a scrubbed studio artifact. It is a bar band on a good night, documented honestly.
What makes it a genuinely local record, and not just a record that happens to be from here, is the venue itself. The Waterhole is the closest thing the North Country has to an every-night rock club — three floors, two bars, a patio, and a booking calendar that stretches from February's Winter Carnival blowouts to a free "Party on the Patio" series every Thursday from April into October. It is the room where Adirondack bands become bands. Cutting your live album there is a statement of allegiance: this is our stage, these are our people, this is the sound of the place we actually play.
You can test the theory in person shortly. The Sven Curth (huge) Trio is slated to perform at the Songs at Mirror Lake 20th-anniversary celebration on Saturday, August 15, at the North Elba Athletic Fields in Lake Placid — sharing a bill with the Adam Ezra Group and the North Mississippi Allstars, which is heady company for a regional three-piece and a fair measure of how far this project has traveled on its home turf.
Here is why a modest self-released live album matters more than its streaming numbers will suggest. Scenes need documentation. A region can have great nights for years and have nothing to show for them once the crowd goes home — no artifact, no proof, nothing to hand the next kid picking up a guitar. Live at Your Local Waterhole is proof. It says a real band played a real room on a real night and someone thought it was worth pressing. Multiply that instinct across a dozen North Country acts and you get something a scene can actually stand on.
Put it on, ideally loud, ideally on a Thursday. Then go stand on the Waterhole patio and hear the room it came from. The album is good. The room is better, and that is the whole idea.
Sources: Feature: The Sven Curth (huge) Trio – 'Live at your local Waterhole' (Obscure Sound); Live at your local Waterhole review (Illustrate Magazine); Songs at Mirror Lake celebrates 20th anniversary (Adirondack Explorer)