Sunday, August 6, 2023
4:00 PM  8:00 PM
Levitt Pavilion DenverRuby Hill ParkDenver

Wallace Stenger may have captured the spirit of the west in his 1971 novel Angle of Repose. Jim Thompson surely exposed the lurid underbelly of the Western experience. Cormac McCarthy definitely evoked the conflicted, tortured spirit of small town life on the frontier. William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor informed all of them with a humor and soulfulness. It is that literary tradition that imbues the harrowing and celebratory sound and riveting stories of Slim Cessna’s Auto Club. Throughout its long and illustrious history, it is largely in that realm of art that the Auto Club reveled and garnered a loyal cult following well beyond the boundaries of The Queen City of the Plains.

Slim Cessna’s Auto Club was originally formed in 1992 in Denver, Colorado by its namesake after he parted ways with The Denver Gentlemen, that grand progenitor of the peculiar strain of Gothic Americana unique to the Mile High City that also featured Jeffrey-Paul and David Eugene Edwards who’d go on to form 16 Horsepower, the latter then founding Wovenhand.  Slim’s longest running collaborators in the Auto Club have been Munly Munly and Lord Dwight Pentacost who’ve contributed both material and affected the ensemble’s stylistic vision. More recently there’ve been greater creative contributions from longtime collaborator Rebecca Vera, drummer Andrew Warner and now the inclusion of Slim’s son George Cessna on bass.

In 2016, the band released it’s most current  album after a five-year hiatus The Commandments According to SCAC.  The album encompassed both the heady darkness and celebratory intensity with which the group made its name.  That charmingly dusky and spare sound breathed with a new color and delicacy of feeling that perhaps sat in the background in times past . The Commandments According to SCAC, was the first full length album of original material released on the Auto Club’s own imprint, SCACUNINCORPORATED. The title evokes the themes of cosmic punishment and redemption that have served the band’s songwriting engine so well in the past. But this set of songs sounds more hopeful and expansive, a quality that was always there but this time out the brighter sides of the songwriting are emphasized. Hints of this saw early full-flown expression on 2008’s Cipher and Unentitled from 2011. With The Commandments, however, the Auto Club seems to step forward into the promise of its own possibilities. It remains capable of the heady darkness and celebratory intensity with which it made its name. Now that charmingly dusky and spare sound breathes with a color and delicacy of feeling that perhaps sat in the background in times past. Maybe it’s partly due to the greater creative contributions from longtime collaborator Rebecca Vera; the core of the band’s songwriting and sound has always been anchored firmly in the vision of Slim, Munly Munly and Lord Dwight Pentacost.

Slim Cessna’s Auto Club also  re-released  their fourth album Cipher on June 2, 2018. This re-issue will be a double vinyl LP in a gatefold sleeve. Originally released in 2008, Cipher is the most cohesive SCAC album but also the most mysterious. Cipher is a deliberate puzzle loaded with coded language. The idea that braces are used to straighten crooked humanity provides a structure, but this code rewards effort to unpack the many messages it contains; many more relevant now than ever. Compared to its predecessors, this set of songs sounds more hopeful and expansive, a quality that was always there but this time out the brighter sides of the songwriting were emphasized.

When you get to see the Auto Club live, you’ll see an already mighty band reinvigorated by a new spirit of excitement as well as by the fire that has long burned in its collective belly.