It’s very telling about the great camaraderie of the four-piece Boulder CO based Teresa Storch Band that in their publicity stills, Storch (lead vocals, acoustic and electric guitars) is not out front as leader but sitting in the back row, next to her husband/collaborator, lead electric guitarist Peter Lacis, part of a seamless whole.
For all the dynamic gritty, improvisation laced pop, rock, funk and jam band music and grooves on their album Open Your Heart, the focus isn’t so much on Storch’s powerhouse emotional voice, Lacis’ versatile guitarisma or the tight rhythms of Chad E. Mathis (bass) and Travis Moberg (drums). They’re all about the hard hitting, no nonsense and incisive at times but leaning hopeful messaging at a fraught time in our sociopolitical history.
The band tackles some hard issues like how women have been treated/harassed in the workplace (“It’s Not Okay,” released as a single to coincide with National Women’s Day). They make a valiant attempt to overcome political and religious division by focusing on the loving messages in the holy books (“Open Your Heart”) and challenge themselves to stand against injustice with references to Mandela, MLK and Joan of Arc. “This is the Time” is a hard-hitting jam about trying to separate truth from lies during election season. They also artfully update Pat Benatar’s 80’s classic “We Belong” to fit the modern zeitgeist.
Yet Storch and the guys choose to open the set with a relentlessly positive message, drawing on personal anecdotes of overcoming past challenges to face the darkness of today, ultimately and defiantly declaring that “Humankind will overcome the worst of itself.” Beyond these stark yet ultimately empowering musical messages, the Teresa Storch Band can be appreciated as a group that, as their bio says, is the “result of a singer/songwriter from the Boston area creating music with a guitarist from the New Jersey jam scene.”
The group is the result of a beautiful and musically fruitful love story that began in 2013 in Boulder after Storch had paused her eight years of touring troubadour life and Lacis was looking for local musicians to play with. They bonded over their mutual love of live music, and especially jam bands, back in college. And now, with their bandmates, the two are creating sociopolitical commentary for the ages, an album that is both a time capsule of the 2020s and timeless in its ability to tape into our collective desire to overcome the daunting darkness.