Text by Augusta Palmer

Taking the stage at almost 11pm, Scissormen were an act worth waiting for this Saturday at The Delancey. Front man Ted Drozdowski lit up the room with guitar pyrotechnics and a sense of fun often absent from live music in New York. Drummer Larry Dersch kept the beat behind him and cemented their stripped-down sound. The Scissormen’s repertoire of North Mississipi Blues channeled the trance-inducing grooves of departed bluesmen Junior Kimbrough and R.L. Burnside directly to a Lower East Side basement.

On several occasions in their concert-length set, Drozdowski wandered the room in search of foreign objects to use as a slide for his guitar. He was playful enough to slip his guitar around the waist of a young female member of the audience and to set it down on my knees for a spell. Dersch followed with a snare, a sly grin and a mild shake of his head at Drozdowski’s incorrigible wandering, eventually even loaning out one of his drums as a slide for Drozdowski’s guitar.

But if these sound like parlor tricks, they were anything BUT that. From the opening “John the Revelator,” through their psychedelic blues, “Tupelo,” to the last song of the night (digitally preserved here), it was clear that Scissormen are the real deal: they combine the juke joint rawness that is so often missing from contemporary blues performances with an unbelievable guitar virtuosity, a beat as insistent as your heart, and a repertoire as sweet as a flask of whiskey on a cold night. Here’s hoping they come back real soon.