Check out The Championship

In today's Weekend, I wrote about an awesome band out of Milwaukee called The Championship, whose debut album "Dance Casador!" is one of my favorite albums of 2006. (It actually came out in late 2005, but I'm sure they won't mind the pub.) If you live in the Fox Valley, check them out Friday at Cranky Pat's in Neenah. Great, great band.

Joe Crockett of Milwaukee band the Championship has a unique game plan for winning the rock ’n’ roll game.

Instead of gigging for several months and then making an album, the Championship recorded its debut CD “Dance Casador!” shortly after forming last May. Once the disc was released in October, the Championship used “Dance Casador!” to land shows and get its name out to indie rock fans throughout the region and beyond.

As introductions go, “Dance Casador!” is about as good as a young band could hope for. With Crockett’s rich baritone and haunting folk-pop melodies providing a sturdy foundation, the Championship marries salt-of-the-earth rootsiness with blurry atmospherics to create a compulsively listenable record that manages to sound old and new at the same time. If a Wisconsin band made a better record in the past year, we haven’t heard it.

But has “Dance Casador!” given the Championship the attention it deserves?

“A lot of people seem to dig it even though it was self-released and we recorded it ourselves,” said Crockett, 24, his voice sounding as deep and contemplative on the phone as it does on the record. “For being a low-budget production, it’s gotten a good response.”

Read more here.

P.S. Here's my Weekend cover story on summer road trips.