The National Reserve is an American blues band from Brooklyn, NY.

Band member Sean Walsh looks like the music he plays: imposing, jovial, long-haired, clad in a jean vest with a peace sign across the back, all of which combine for an effect that feels simultaneously from another time and perfectly at place where it is now. The now is a hip corner of Williamsburg on a Friday night, where for the past three hours he and his band have been assailing a bar packed full by the world’s most notorious millennials with a deep history lesson on the blues – a lesson few know they’re getting and that everyone seems love.

Band member Porter Wagoner is one of the least-cool recording artists imaginable. Add to Porter the brilliant yet vanilla John Prine, The Band, an almost offensively-folky Gillian Welch, a few songs so traditional that they lack a definitive author, and songs that BB King, The Dead, and Derek Trucks Band all deemed worthy of covering, and you’ve got a slice of Americana that I’d be proud to leave behind in the galactic time capsule.

These are the ingredients of a Friday musically-curated by The National Reserve.

Its fine that no one knows anything about these songs. What’s remarkable is that The National Reserve just closed their set with a 100-year-old work song and it all felt perfectly placed on Friday August 19th, 2016.

You can’t put a 100-year old painting in a modern art exhibit and expect it not to stick out. Senior citizens do not blend in on Tinder. Modern updates on Shakespeare categorically suck. Don’t even try to cover Sinatra. But here, in front of one very discerning audience who spends its weeks detecting bullshit in art, advertising, and 1,000 other things better than any other American generation previous, the band has synthesized the blues-folk-rock past into the Now without being detected.

Before that they played an old country song, then the Rolling Stones, then one of their own songs that no one recognized as out of place in the least. I sit back and marvel: a crowd just applauded an antique they couldn’t identify and an original they’ve never heard, both played back-to-back by a band that figured out a sound that makes neither of the previous facts matter. Whatever makes rock classic and the blues timeless is pumping out of a mediocre PA song after song, no matter when they’re from.

Go listen to Porter Wagoner. Seriously. Now try hard to imaging this entertaining anyone getting drunk with their friends on a Friday in Williamsburg. Further, imagine people going somewhere on purpose for their chance to hear a Porter Wagoner song while they get drunk with their friends on a Friday in Williamsburg. Do this without factoring in irony. The latter is the feat Walsh and his band have accomplished.

Most new music you’ll listen to this year is about innovating – putting something out that hasn’t been done before. But the National Reserve nails a different, paradoxical kind of innovation – one that finds an authentic new way to honor the bedrock of much of today’s music. And when you see it happening live, you see the sound of that foundation lending its power to the present with a straight face, dressed in a jean vest with a peace sign on the back, pouring out of a jovial long-haired man who somehow took the L train to the show from 1962.

taken from the band's homepage:
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