The Bootstrap Boys are a four piece outlaw country band from Grand Rapids, MI. I fucking hate country music with a passion that can't be put into words. I hate that somewhere around 2007, damn near every punk friend I had were listening to Johnny goddamn Cash and Waylon fuckhead Jennings. Jocks, preps, and rednecks were our sworn enemies and somehow every punk asshole with a denim battle vest was now a country music fan and they had acoustic guitars and were now singing about hopping trains and drinking beer shittier than PBR. What the serious fuck???
So here I am, 15 years later, singing the praises of a MOTHERFUCKINGCOUNTRYBAND. Sorry for all the swears. I'm punk. It's part of my vernacular. (just breathe you idiot, it's going to be OK)
I'm only slightly biased here. I moved into a house a few years ago and one of the residents happens to be Nick, the guitarist for The Bootstrap Boys. He would play me songs and invite me to their gigs. I was mostly polite and would decline, saying that it just wasn't my thing. Then one night, around the fire, he put on their latest EP, New Beginnings.
Dammit. It's really good. Like, it shouldn't be this good. They self-released this EP themselves in 2021. Nick is an amazing guitar player who has done his research. He came from the punk scene. Hell, all of them have. They started in different punk/indie/metal bands and formed this one to play shitty dive bars and make some beer money. then they started writing originals and it became the beast that it is today. What I love about this band is that they are damn good at what they do. Even better? They're politics lean WAAAAAAY left. These guys are all about killing fascists and rallying behind the LGBTQ community, as they are a part of it. What's more punk rock than hijacking a style of music that has a long history of being racist and conservative, and doing it better than they did? On top of that, as if it couldn't get any better for me, these punks are still doing things DIY. They put their own records out, book their own tours, and pack up in a camper van and just do it. The amount of work that Lil Mama does for this band should be written about in the pantheons of DIY punk.
But what about this EP? This EP is fantastic. Nick, Jeff, and Johnny are the perfect backing band to vocalist Jake Stilson's song writing. Jake has that perfect amount of drawl to his voice that is perfectly midwest but still country. His lyrics and cadence are spot-the-fuck-on. You would think these guys have been hiding in the backwoods of Tennessee their whole lives, but they are in fact from Michigan. And not even "cool" Michigan, like Detroit. They're from Grand Rapids. We invented the pyramid scheme. Yep. We did that.
This EP is a perfectly short vacation from whatever punk rock you're currently listening to. My personal favorite? "Some Days" and "Wildcat Mountain". Check it out on all the streaming services. They just got back from Texas where they recorded a full length with Dave Percefull at Yellow Dog Studios. That dude did some mixing with Green Day on a couple of their records. That's pretty cool in my book. If New Beginnings is any indication of what the full length is going to be like, then we are all in for a treat. Score this one a solid 8/10. Bite me.
