Don't expect to find the Wilders' self-titled album from 2011 on any year-end Americana lists. Though the band has been kicking around the Kansas City acoustic-music scene for some fifteen years, its modesty borders on invisibility. In a less cosmetically conscious world the quartet would give the Civil Wars and Lucero, if not the Band Perry, a run for their modernized twang. The band has a fire-and-brimstone frontman in Ike Sheldon and a shredding fiddler in Betse Ellis, and shifts smartly between Dixie-dipped breakdowns and dobro-driven ballads of rural doom.
What to Expect: It's no small task opening for Pokey LaFarge & the South City Three, but the Wilders has the dirty dexterity to handle what's certain to be two sold-out sets of country blues.
