Review: Cactus Blossoms’ Turf Club residency remains one of the Twin Cities’ best music traditions

“I’m gonna pick up where I was last week,” Jack Torrey told the comfortably packed crowd Monday night at the Turf Club. “Complaining about billionaires.”

A steady sign of wealth within the Twin Cities music scene, Torrey’s neo-twang group the Cactus Blossoms picked up where they left off last week, last year and last decade at the St. Paul watering hole that perfectly matches their unfabricated vintage vibe.

The Turf Club is where Torrey and his brother Page Burkum cut their teeth and sharpened their uncanny Everly Brotherly harmonies playing a weekly gig in the early 2010s. Their band’s old lineup is enshrined in a mural outside the venue in honor of those shows.

As the Cactus Blossoms evolved and added a stylish but gritty guitar groove behind their gorgeous sibling harmonies, they settled into playing a January residency at the Turf Club starting in 2017. The Monday night shows now consistently sell out and have become an annual event. Some of their most enlightened fans revere the residency enough to actually anticipate the dark days of winter.

Checking in on the residency series this week, it was obvious the shows haven’t lost any mojo. Really, they’ve only gotten better.

For starters, you probably won’t hear the 80-plus-year-old Turf Club sounding more pristine and polished than when the Cactus Blossoms are there. The Blossoms’ longtime sound engineer, Tom Herbers, has long since had the place dialed in for the group. It’s maybe the nearest thing to being at the Ryman Auditorium within Minnesota.

Leading that warm wave of sound is the group’s long-affixed guitar ace Jake Hanson.

Previously known as more of an innovative indie-rock sideman who played with the likes of Haley and Halloween, Alaska, Hanson adds rich textures of pedal-steel-style tearfulness and soft ambient twang to the music via the arsenal of sleek guitars he brings to the Turf Club every week. You know the guitar tones are going to get lovely when Jake sits down on his amp during a Cactus Blossoms show, as he did just a few songs into Monday night’s set for the mellower highlights “Ballad of an Unknown” and “Powder Blue.”

Drummer Jeremy Hanson and bassist Phillip Hicks Jake’s brother and Jack and Page’s cousin, respectively, making this a true family band — have developed quite a rapport, too.

The rhythm keepers not only played loose with the grooves and added a cool swagger to some of the group’s more recent and more up-tempo tunes, including “Hey Baby” and “Runaway,” each from the 2022 album “One Day.” They also stretched out older tunes like “Stoplight Kisses” and the song that prompted the billionaire slam, “Downtown,” giving them a sort of ‘70s-Nashville rhythmic sheen à la Jerry Reed or Don Williams.

As usually happens at these Turf Club shows, Torrey and Burkum also played around with the set list. They added more cover tunes than usual, including two of the four tunes they recorded for last year’s EP “If Not for You (Bob Dylan Songs, Vol. 1),” highlighted by a dramatic “To Ramona. Old covers by Johnnie & Jack, the Kinks and Bob Wills were also thrown in.

In the encore, they brought out the night’s opening singer Geoffrey Lamar Wilson — whose namesake group Laamar offered their own elegant twang earlier — to help raise the Waylon and Willie classic “Mamas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys.”

Monday’s 1¾-hour set also included a slow-shuffling, wryly written new song, “Honey, I’m Homeless,” about which Torrey said, “It’s taken me 10 years to write it.” He hinted they might unveil other newbies at next week’s gig as they prepare to start recording a new album next month.

Testing new material has also become a tradition in the Cactus Blossoms’ residency run. That’s just one of the many ways these winter shows always seem to be more about moving forward and evolving than just revisiting the past — which is just one of many reasons the January gigs never seem to get old.