This band of three brothers and three others seems to have sprung fully formed from their own record collections in little more than a year.

They freely admit a debt to Gram Parsons, Bob Dylan, Fleetwood Mac and Wilco, the latter an influence that would be hard to discern on its own. The music seems more influenced, perhaps, by Wilco's milieu in the mid-to-late nineties, a sonic era rife with acoustic guitars, banjos, pedal steel guitars and a quest for "authenticity," before the concept took on a hipster connotation and the word itself needed the cover of quotation marks.

Here's a sample; photos from the Congress show are after the jump.

That era owed a lot to punks like the Mekons, Alejandro Escovedo and Green on Red who played country for its heart, and respected their elders like Doc Watson and Jimmy Dale Gilmore and Guy Clark. The pop reference was not so much Fleetwood Mac but Neil Young.

A hokey sentimentalist like me might be tempted to consider Roadkill Ghost Choir "keepers of the flame." Tell me what was it like. I mistakenly thought I had something better to do.