Already the winner of Home Grown Music Network’s “Studio Album of the Year” award, along with being named the “New HGMN Band of the Year,” BIG Something’s debut release, Stories From the Middle of Nowhere, finds the six piece on a promising path quite early in the group’s career. From the rocking guitar work, through the tasteful sax play, on to the funky keys, and the drum and bass backbone, BIG Something is a band that doesn’t fail the promising capacity of its name.

Heavy on the jam, this rock/funk/jazz-entwined album is inspired by the curious escapades of a pimp named Pinky and although this might seem something of an odd concept, the band pulls it off (The lyrics aren’t totally about being a pimp; many of the songs have a much deeper thread than that.) The album begins with the adrenaline blast of “Pinky Goes to Jail,” where we find out that Pinky’s “been a long time running from the deputy,” and that’s never a promising start to a story but that’s just how Pinky operates. He later ends up in “Graham County” a country-rooted song with some select sax work along the way. Pinky’s had a hard time by this point in the album, realizing that “I gotta wait all day, ‘cause if you ain’t pleading guilty, they still try to make you pay.” Running back, to back, to back, “Pinky’s Woman” starts off sounding like something from Pink Floyd’s canon, and then it turns into something from the great, Shuggie Otis: “Saturday Night Zombie” and “Josh’s Disco” are ready for a headlining set on someone’s footloose and freaky festival grounds. With a dose of Funk/Jazz/Reggae Fusion, the final track, “In the Middle” ponders something we’ve all considered somewhere along the way. Longing for a place it’s often hard to get back to: “Feel like I’m goin’ crazy in the big machine. Sometimes you think you know it all; sometimes you don’t know anything. But I wanna know, I want to know why’s it gotta be this way? And I wanna go, I want to go to how it was in the first place.” Maybe this is just Pinky’s final lament, but it’s certainly a universally applicable sentiment, and the music behind it is a joy, as is the album as a whole.