Review: Tyler Childers sings like a yokel, commands like a rock star at Armory in Minneapolis

The band played an instrumental jam built around samples of clucking hens. Fiddle and pedal-steel laced many of the songs. Coal and whiskey repeatedly came up in the lyrics. Hank Williams got covered. There was even a between-song shoutout to a local horse trader.

Wednesday's concert by "All Your'n" hitmaker Tyler Childers at the Armory in Minneapolis was about as hick as country concerts get in the year 2023. Who'd have guessed it would also be one of the hippest, hottest and funkiest shows of the year?

The concert was an instant sell-out, and tickets on resale sites hovered around $200 in the ensuing months. That's quite a leap from only filling First Avenue his last time in town in 2019.

Credit a surprise breakout on TikTok and a cool following from young, Nashville-wearying urban cowboys and cowgirls who are similarly enamored of the even faster-rising, authentic Oklahoma twang-man Zach Bryan.

Playing to 8,000 fans — most of whom seemed to cheer louder the more his voice sounded more warbled and drawled — Childers came off like the unlikeliest of modern rock stars during the nearly 2¼-hour performance.

The lanky Kentucky singer/songwriter, 31, kicked off the show with a five-song solo/acoustic set that captivated the crowd from the get-go. Fans voraciously sang along to "Nose on the Grindstone," "Follow You to Virgie" and "Lady May," the latter a love song in which Childers sheepishly confesses, "Now I ain't the sharpest chisel."

You did have to question his wisdom, since it seemed like the concert might have peaked early with that intimate run of fan favorites. Once his molasses-thick band the Food Stamps kicked into roadhouse-boogie gear with "Whitehouse Road," though, it instantly became clear that a lot more fun was to be had.

He and the six-piece unit split up the set list into sonically themed montages.

First came some of their more bluegrassy, lightly twangy ditties such as "I Swear (to God)," "All Your'n" and "Country Squire," the latter a love song for a vintage camper trailer. Then came deep-grooving rawhide-rockers such as "Purgatory" and "Cluck Ol' Hen." A cover of current Texas Monthly magazine cover boy Charley Crockett's "Tom Turkey" fit in nicely somewhere in between.

With heavy organ-pumping from keyboardist Chase Lewis signaling a turn from Saturday night to Sunday morning, the last run in the set list was filled with a string of gospel-flavored rave-ups — a spiritedly spiritual sound heavily explored on Childers' latest album, the three-LP revisionist set "Can I Take My Hounds to Heaven?"

That fire-and-brimstone segment started with a smoking interpretation of Williams' "Old Country Church" and peaked with "House Fire," which became a jammy showcase for the band.

Through it all, Childers — who fought for sobriety in recent years and has been known to come off as cranky at times — seemed to be in good spirits.

He reminisced about previously playing at Minneapolis' Armory as the opening act for Jack White in 2018 "and having a cold sweat come on," as he and the band fought through broken gear and the nerves of playing to such a big crowd.

And now look at Childers, with a White-like command of his own killer band and their packed audience.

As for his opener, South Carolinian soul-rock good-ol'-boy Marcus King only showed the hot kind of sweat as he delivered a riveting 45-minute set rife with Allman Brothers-style guitar grooving and his Chris Stapleton-meets-Stevie Wonder powerhouse vocals.