Chickie Wah Wah is the place to be on Thursday night to hear one of the most innovative and interesting bands to hit New Orleans in a long while. Steelism is an instrumental band out of Nashville, Tennessee led by guitarist Jeremy Fetzer and pedal steel player Spencer Cullum.
The band is relatively young and this is only their second time performing in New Orleans, but their first in a nightclub. Last October, they appeared at the Louisiana Music Factory.
At that performance, I was struck by the way Fetzer, on a telecaster, musically interacted with Cullum on his pedal steel. They perform music inspired by the instrumental sounds of the 1960s—bands like the Ventures and Booker T. and the M.G.’s. There is also an element of spaghetti western soundtrack sounds, especially when the pedal steel gets downright spooky.
The “Factory” wasn’t the best setting for this style of music, which I suspect will be more at home at night in a dimly lit club.
Cullum and Fetzer have backed artists like Wanda Jackson, Johnny Fritz, Rayland Baxter, and Andrew Combs. The two met while touring the United Kingdom with Nashville songstress Caitlin Rose, quickly bonded, and began writing together between sound checks.
Though they grew up on different continents (Cullum hails from Essex, England; Fetzer from Canton, Ohio), they were cut from the same musical cloth. Their debut EP “The Intoxicating Sounds of Pedal Steel and Guitar” was met with critical acclaim, with American Songwriter’s Sean Maloney calling Steelism, “instantly recognizable—surf, country, blues, all steeped in soul and heavy on the grooves—but astoundingly outside the contemporary vernacular.”
The duo’s full-length debut 615 to FAME was released in September 2014. It was recorded partially at Muscle Shoals’ historic FAME Studios and features ten original instrumentals and one cover.
