On their second LP, Columbia’s E.Z. Shakes expand what they can be by getting closer to who they were in the first place.
The songs are more narrative-driven, but they still chase quandaries of good and evil, faith and disbelief. They accomplish this by focusing on singer-songwriter Zach Seibert’s experience growing up, bouncing from town to town and church to church with hippie parents, the source of his spiritual wanderlust.
The dark and lonely recesses of a mind in solitude have been explored by many a folk singer. So too have conflicts between faith and doubt, God and the Devil, good and evil — and various scramblings of which gets lined up with what.
So by rights, Zach Seibert’s band E.Z. Shakes, which concerns itself with all of the above, shouldn’t feel so singular. But “The Spirit” — as it’s performed intimately here in front of Jarod Charzewski The Band Shell installation at the St. Andrews branch of the Richland Library, and as it appears with more echoing grandeur on the group’s forthcoming and identically titled second LP — proves once more that there’s just something about Seibert and company that makes them distinct from so many other artists who tread similar ground.