Session Recorded by Patrick Stolley - Let there be a lesson learned here. Assuming that anyone’s music is an honest representation of the artist’s true character is a foolish act. If it wasn’t true, we would have trembled a touch with an impetuous thought that Two Gallants were as dangerous as their desperado images in song. Over the course of “What the Toll Tells,” the San Francisco band’s latest on Saddle Creek Records, we hear lead singer Adam Stephens sing as if he should have been held accountable for a good half a dozen grave diggings, autopsies and criminal investigations. He’s murderous and self-destructive – killing his wife and throwing her body in the Frisco Bay, claiming to have a knife for your throat and spending the previous evening exploring the interior of the Las Cruces Jail. All we could say upon meeting Stephens and his lifelong mate and drummer Tyson Vogel was bravo for selling a man capable of these heinous crimes. They’re two of the loveliest men you’re going to meet and the tracks that they chose to record for their Daytrotter Session (listed and available below) is a shade of their characters that also finds some showtime on the record, but the color and the imagined bloodshed in the raging numbers overshadows just how stirring they can be when they’ve dealt with and resolved a temper rather than giving in to it. It’s still a fun exercise to listen for Stephens clenching his teeth together as he sings a line that’s got some kind of twisting, unsavory motive behind it and it tends to add an intriguing subversion to words that are bouquets from a distance. But like Bret Michaels preaches, “Every rose has its thorn.” For Stephens and Vogel, every rose also has a loaded shotgun just in case. The Gallants came in to the studio with our old buddies the afternoon of playing a local show and brought our old buddies Drakkar Sauna (now would be a good time to revisit their **** great Daytrotter session) with them. Jeff and Wallace caught the end of a Detroit Pistons playoff game at a pub and then took seats on the control room sofa to listen as their bros laid it down. Four peas in a pod. – Sean Moeller