KFB

Megan Jean & the KFB

If you’re at all familiar with the music of Megan Jean and her husband, Byrne Klay, the best way to prepare for their new album, Tarantistas, is to forget everything you know about the duo. 

On their first two albums, Megan Jean & the KFB (Klay Family Band for long) combined many ideas — early 20th century ragtime and vaudeville and horror movie-inspired lyrics — into a bare-bones percussion-and-banjo sound. Using her hurricane of a voice, Jean would often take on exaggerated accents or personas, intoning her gothic lyrics with a somber growl or taking on uptempo songs with a ’20s flapper squawk. It was a lot of fun, and it sat squarely in the increasingly wide Americana category. You could imagine them playing with any number of acoustic, washboard-and-kitsch groups in bars and clubs around the country. 

Coming five years after their last album, Tarantistas finds Jean and Klay moving into something entirely new. The 11 songs are alive with layers of percussion, a warm and soulful rhythm section occasionally punctuated by horns, and one of the most stunning beginning-to-end vocal performances you’re likely to hear this year.

Taken as a whole, the album — featuring Klay and Jean on multiple instruments and a small group of additional musicians, including Steve Sancho on percussion and Ron Westray on trombone — is a stunner.

Kicking off with the midtempo groover “Voodoo Doll” and carrying through the fast-paced, jazzy “My My My,” the pulsing funk-rocker “Playground Queen,” and the moody, atmospheric ballad “Feel Alive,” Jean sings like her life depends on it, multi-tracking rings around herself and jettisoning any sort of persona to simply let her nakedly emotional voice wail, rage and cry like the force of nature it is. 

This music also came at a time when it seemed like the duo was about to take their career to a new level. After years of doing essentially everything themselves, they signed with a booking agent, then landed a record deal. 

“We really did think it was our big moment,” Jean says. “When we found out we had an agent, we did shots with the bar; they were so happy for us. Then we lost our agent due to a whole heap of BS that nobody wants to hear, and then we lost our deal, because if you don’t have a national agent, no label is going to put out your record. Most labels take submissions from booking agencies, so they really have taken the place of label A&R at this point.”

The band was devastated, but they persevered, recording Tarantistas on a shoestring at the Jam Room in Columbia with Zac Thomas behind the boards, then shopping it to a record label again. Sadly, the second time wasn’t the charm.

“When we got dropped by our agency, and then our deal fell through, we just wanted to prove that we didn’t need any of that to be artists,” Jean says. “So, we just made the album of our dreams with Zac whom we have a special partnership with. We made exactly the album we wanted to hear. When we took it back to the label, and they said they wanted to put it out, that felt good, too, but I wasn’t so ready to celebrate because we still had to find an agent.”

Once again, Jean and Klay were frustrated by their flirtation with the mainstream.

“I met with an agent who basically told me to lose weight and then they’d be interested,” she says. “I still had to be a hot chick for my work to be considered. That is not who I am, why I make music, or what I want to foster for female artists in the future. So we stopped trying and just decided to put it out ourselves.”

They did that through a Kickstarter campaign that met its 30-day goal of $8,000 in four days. After being done for a year and a half, Tarantistas will finally be released on CD and LP this summer, thanks largely to the fans and friends that Jean and Klay made crisscrossing the country and playing hundreds of shows. 

It has been, to say the least, a vindication.

“I’d started to feel hopeless,” Jean says, “and then I just remembered one day: I set out to be an artist, and I’ve achieved that. These industry people can never take away my voice, my ability to move people, or our connection with our following. I had this sneaking feeling that people don’t value my music because they are physically attracted to me, and that it really is the music that resonates with them. At a certain point as an artist you’ve got to take yourself seriously enough to walk away from all that to a smaller career with self-respect. So that’s what we did.” 


What: Megan Jean & the KFB

Where: Hunter-Gatherer, 900 Main St. 

When: Friday, March 30, 11 p.m.

Price: $8

More: 803-748-0540, huntergathererbrewery.com

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