Artist:     Banjo Nickaru and Western Scooches

Album:     Get Us Out of Fearland

Label:     On the Bol Records

Release Date:     6.15.18

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This duo’s nicknames may be too cute by half, but their hippie-like spirit manages to be heartwarming without crossing into corny (and hey, names never stopped the String Cheese Incident or Hootie and the Blowfish). The sweet-voiced Betina Hershey—or Scooch if you prefer—sounds just about as joyful as a person can be while writing and singing what’s on her mind. With Nick Russo/Nickaru contributing a gallery of folky instruments well beyond just the banjo, they show a heart as big as the sky and genre-spanning tastes wide enough to match.

Hershey hooks the ears right away as if she doesn’t have a care in the world: “Soar like nobody’s crying / soar like nothing could go wrong.” Something will, of course—there are some less happy sentiments also to come in the course of their second EP, but the ups and downs have the it-is-what-it-is messiness of real life. The pair and their similarly eclectic crew (who aren’t considered backing players so much as family) make it clear that lifting each other up is what life’s all about.

Starting with the title Get Us Out of Fearland itself, the band shows they’d rather focus less on the fear and more on the getting out. From that song’s hopeful old-South spiritual vibe to the classic Dixie bluegrass of “A Hundred Miles” (the lone trad. tune on the list), mixed with spots of vaudeville music hall and jaunty N’awlins creole among several others, it’s a too-brief ride full of high energy and higher spirits.

One could wish the songs themselves had more meat on their bones. The band can build a nice head of steam, though with barely any tracks cracking the three-minute mark, they often end up hitting a dead stop just when it feels like time to really take off. Still, once the disc closes with its brightest ray of sunshine, a summer singalong with enough bright-eyed charm to make a litter of kittens jealous, the short run time only means it’s that much easier to just pop in again… and again.

—Geno Thackara