Brian Slattery Photos
Kat and Sam Wallace.
Sam Wallace, lead singer of River Run, looked out over the audience at Best Video Friday night and saw a lot of faces she recognized.
“Hey, y’all,” she said with a smile. Her sister Kat, fiddle ready, looked over at their father Bill on guitar and counted off the tempo to the group’s first song, and they were off.
The New Haven-based Americana trio River Run was a family band in the best sense of the word; they played as if they really had grown up playing music together, as if questions about rhythm and phrasing had been worked out long ago, perhaps in the living room or in the car, and now that the family was playing in front of an audience, the rest of us got to see it for the first time.
Sam’s powerful voice made it clear why she took lead vocals, and yet her voice and Kat’s blended as only siblings’ voices can. Bill’s guitar provided the solid foundation for them both. The final element in the band’s sound was Kat’s fiddle playing, at which she excelled. Very much at home in the idiom of bluegrass playing, Kat also used changes in tone and timbre to great effect, sometimes letting lines of melody sweep the room, sometimes laying down a rich pedal tone, and other times drawing little more than a glassy whisper out of the instrument, all to great effect.
“It is so nice to be back at Best Video,” Sam said close to the beginning of River Run’s set. “This is like our home.” True to her word, as the set progressed, the vibe in the room got more and more comfortable. Kat led the way with a joke to introduce one of Sam’s songs.
“This next one is about turning people down,” she said. “One of my favorite pasttimes.” This made for the first of several moments of appreciative laughter.
“This is what happens when we play Best Video,” Sam said. “All our secrets come out.”
Bill Wallace.
As Bill stood by, beaming, the sisters regaled the crowd with stories of a trip to Scotland that involved both getting acquainted with good whiskey and (unrelated) failing to befriend a sheep on the Isle of Skye. To introduce another song, Sam began to construct a point about the fleetingness of life, which Kat then neatly summarized.
“We’re here for a second, and everything is trash,” she said.
The joke landed as laughter rippled across the room.
“It’s true!” she said, her voice chipper. “Everything is trash.”
Among the family secrets the sisters revealed was that they were in the process of recording an album that Kat estimated would be out in September.
“Release party!” someone yelled from the back.
“Maybe it’ll be at Best Video!” Kat replied.
The sisters sang “Happy Birthday” to their mother, who was in attendance. Bill revealed toward the end that the sisters had done a terrible job of sticking to the setlist (“he’s revealing everything!” Kat said). For their final song, Kat put down her fiddle and both sisters took the microphones off their stands to serenade each other, in time leaning into each other. Bill leaned in too. It was funny, and a good piece of showmanship. But it was also sincere.
