Rainville

If Rainville were a place, rather than Colorado’s best alt-country band as voted by readers of the Denver Post it would be warm and familiar, the kind of place where even feeling bad feels good.

The four-piece band hauls its “gritty rural rock mixed with swampy blues, old-school country and gutter jazz” to the desert in support of its second album, The Longest Street in America. For fans of straight-up whiskey-drinking rock the kind that sometimes sits in your gut just a little too long the street is well worth traveling. While it’s twangy and tough, Rainville’s music is no hick parade, thanks to smart lyrics by raspy-voiced front man John Common. In “Real Man,” he tells us, “All I ever write are blues songs/’cause all I ever feel is bad.”

What can we say? One man’s pain is a listener’s salvation.