DON'T FENCE US IN

Embracing their roots on record for the first time, Don't call us southern” band The Cold Stares’ seventh album is both a love letter to Kentucky and a Call for unity in volatile times.

- Henry Yates

As far back as he can remember, whenever Chris Tapp opened a music magazine or was introduced by a DJ, the ‘S’ word preceded him. “We were always getting tagged as ‘southern’ something,” The Cold Stares frontman says, smiling. “Y’know, ‘southern rock’, ‘southern gothic’… We just thought of ourselves as a blues-rock band.”

Talking to Kentucky-born Tapp today, the Bluegrass State is present in the singer’s twang. Musically, though, things are a little muddier. The Cold Stares formed in 2012, and the trio’s six albums to date are as much in thrall to the British Invasion as to the Allmans/Skynyrd set texts.

That figures, Tapp shrugs: “When I was thirteen and they needed a guitar player at the Moose Lodge, they’d bring me in the side door. I’d sit in with the old guys. And Skynyrd was part of that – I loved their early stuff, and was always sad they got tied into that rebel-flag garbage. But we also played Zeppelin, Bad Company, Robin Trower. I thought Free were from Alabama, because it sounded southern to me. I was never a bluegrass guy. I always had a rock’n’roll bone in me.”

It was around the time that last year’s acclaimed Voices was attracting the usual descriptors that Tapp wondered what might happen if he, drummer Brian Mullins and bassist Bryce Klueh embraced their own version of the South, rather than the media’s glib definition. “I just started thinking about what ‘southern’ meant to me, and what it was really like growing up in these small towns.” But the real kick-starter for the band’s seventh album – emphatically titled