Moriarty (FR)

About

Named after Dean Moriarty, the restless hero of Kerouac's On the Road, this Franco American collective has been weaving blues, country, folk and rock into something entirely their own since forming in Paris in 1995. An early lineup shakeup actually pushed them somewhere more interesting: losing their drummer and percussionists forced the remaining five to strip things back acoustically, which freed them to play everywhere from a Norman prison to a ruined Tuscan castle. Their 2007 debut, Gee Whiz But This Is a Lonesome Town, recorded in eight days in a Breton farmhouse attic near Merlin's tomb, broke through in France on the strength of the song "Jimmy" and eventually sold around 150,000 copies worldwide. The follow up, The Missing Room, arrived in 2011 after the band road tested the songs across five months of touring, from the Fuji Rock Festival in Japan to a prison in eastern France. They released it on their own label, Air Rytmo, an anagram of Moriarty, giving them full artistic control. The vinyl edition was something else entirely: 2,000 hand assembled sleeves, each containing a unique envelope stuffed with drawings, broken guitar strings, old set lists and tour souvenirs.