Not quite the Dropkick Murphys-style fiddle jockeys their name vaguely suggests, Reckless Kelly has been making twangy alt-country roots-rock since they formed in Bend, Oregon, in the mid-'90s.
Named after Australian bank robber Ned Kelly, the band later relocated to Austin and released a string of well-received country-charting albums, including Under the Table and Above the Sun (2003), Wicked Twisted Road (2005), Reckless Kelly Was Here (2006), and their biggest seller to date, Bulletproof (2008), which rose to number 14 on Billboard's U.S. Indie index. That album also included candid commentary on Hurricane Katrina and the Iraq War, marking Reckless Kelly as one of those bands with blue-state politics performing in the red-state idiom. (The Dixie Chicks will be happy to know that they're not alone in the world.)
Reckless Kelly's latest disc, Somewhere in Time, is a back-to-basics kind of thing—a tribute album to musical hero Pinto Bennett that the band has described as "straight-up honky-tonk." But of course.
