A friend of mine is friends with the main guy from the Foundry Field Recordings and I obligingly went along to see them last night when they passed through town. FFR are from Missouri and play pretty straightforward indie rock. They were friendly, I talked to the whole band pretty much, since there wasn’t much of a crowd on a rainy Monday night.

The main problem I had with these guys was that I had trouble (continue to have trouble) remembering their name. I keep mixing it up with Pure Prairie League.

Anyway I didn’t know anything going in but left with the whole bio of the band… basically the lead guy, named Billy, put together a new band after the other members from the past got involved in old-people things like families and postgraduate work, so his backing band was the members of another band called Bald Eagle. They were pretty great. I was even a little jealous… I used to write a lot of music in the ’90s-indie vein that FFR played, and I would love to have a band like that backing me up. Sigh. The drummer rocked in particular.

I picked up one of their CDs, not just to support the band, and listened to it at work today. They played a number of the ones on the CD at the show but also introduced material that was not yet released, and the newer stuff impressed me more. The live band made the songs punchier and a little more rockin’ than the CD versions, though both were good. The CD reminded me of the Radiohead/Death Cab era in which it was put together; the live show reminded me more of all the ’90s underground indie that I love.

Anyway… worth checking them out. Here’s their myspace page with more infos; and here’s a cell phone pic from last night: