Brother O’ Brother “Brother O’ Brother” 2014. Fonoflo Records. There I am with guitarist-singer-frontman extraordinaire Chris Banta and champion heavy-hitter drummer Warner Swopes!

We cleared our calendar and scraped the ice off the car to catch the Indianapolis-based power duo at Brenner Brewing Co. in Milwaukee on Saturday night in the midst of the first big snowstorm of the season; after seeing them for the first time in August at Appleton’s Mile of Music and having our minds blown, a little weather wasn’t going to deter us.

Banta and Snopes brought the blizzard mixture of garagey punk-blues stompers and gospel-infused howls indoors with their wild performance of songs from the debut LP Brother O’ Brother, including the slow-burn bluesy “Means To Be a Woman.” (I honestly don’t remember if they played another favorite “Coke Bottle Lens” but I’m including it here because it’s so damn good.) They also ripped through several stand-out tracks from their 2015 release Show Pony: “The Itch,” “You Would” and “Wolf In Sheeps Clothing.”

Because of the weather, attendance was pretty small for the show. The upside was that we got to chat with the guys for awhile both before and after the show, including a conversation about Banta’s white loafers (see picture above): Joe has the exact same pair and I may have given him some shit about them in the past. Well, he’s vindicated.

Brother O’ Brother will be swinging back through Wisconsin in January, playing at Mill Creek in Appleton on January 6th, and we will be heading up there to see them again in all their frenzied garage-blues-punk energy.