Orville Peck (2019)

One Liner: Weirdo anonymous dude making 

Wikipedia Genre: country (but like an indie amalgamation of country)
Home: Canada

Poster Position: 16

Weekend Two Only. 

Thoughts:  Well now, that's a whole thing, isn't it?  An anonymous Canadian singer who wears a weird cowboy hat with long fringe mask thing to cover his face and hide his identity.  And he sounds like a cross between Morissey and Roy Orbison, singing semi-country tunes.  You can tell he is white and has blue eyes, but otherwise he looks to be a 20-something dude who makes music.  Oh, and he's gay, which seems to be mentioned in every article about him.

He won't reveal his real name, or where he's actually from, but he claims to have played in multiple punk bands prior to this thing.  But a queer, masked country guy playing the same stage as Kacey Musgraves makes all sorts of sense.

Just one album, 2019's Pony, which features him in his mask and hat on the cover.  "Take You Back (The Iron Hoof Cattle Call)" has this amazingly kitschy cowboy sound, and yet I kind of love it anyway.  The top track is "Dead of Night," a track about two gay hustlers in the desert, that somehow still sounds like a it could be a Johnny Cash cover by Lana Del Rey sung by a guy wearing a classic lampshade.

Pretty good - the guy's voice is legit.  "Buffalo Run" sounds like an old R.E.M. song and I'm here for it.  Seriously, queue up that song and just imagine the band is REM, sounds totally like something they would have done in the Document era.  "Hope to Die" sounds kind of like a Broadway showtune - like if Dear Evan Hansen had a portion based in the Old West.  In fact, this guy should go do some Broadway work.

I honestly should have moved on from this guy a while ago, but I really am enjoying it.  I'll give you one more track to taste test, but you should just go listen to the album.  This is "Turn to Hate," with 155k views and 328k streams.

Another one that has a good college radio rock feel, even though thtere are definite country tinges to it as well, but you could easily pass this off as REM or Sonic Youth or The Decemberists, all just trying on a little Western flavor.

Between this, Musgraves, Yola, Tyler Childers, Billy Strings, and Chris Shiflett (and probably others I haven't yet discovered) we are going to have a serious weirdo country party at this year's ACL, and I dig it.