There is a recording studio in southwest Louisiana called Poolside Studios where, for the past five years, a six-piece blues band has been showing up every week to play. Not to rehearse, exactly, and not to perform in the ordinary sense, but to do the thing that separates the bands that know what they are doing from the bands that are still figuring it out, which is to play together with enough regularity that the music stops being executed and starts being inhabited. J Dulva and Counting Coup have been building that habitation for five years in Eunice, Louisiana, and Counting of the Coup, released May 1, 2026 on the occasion of the band’s sixth anniversary, is the document of what that accumulation produces when you capture it live without overdubs, without safety nets, without the studio interventions that most recordings use to manage the risk of the real thing. This is a blues record that sounds like a blues record made by people who have earned the right to sound this way.
The six-piece lineup that Dulva leads is a genuine ensemble in the classical sense, each member carrying a distinct function that the whole requires. Dulva himself handles vocals, guitar, and harmonica, the frontman’s role demanding the combination of technical range and stage presence that holds everything else together. Missy Benoit contributes vocals and keyboards, a dual role that places her simultaneously in the melodic core and the harmonic foundation of the arrangements. Steve Benoit holds the bass, the low-end anchor that a blues band playing live without studio assistance depends on more than most genres require. Mike Picou adds vocals and harmonica, the dual harmonica configuration creating a richness and a dialogue in that instrument’s presence that single-harmonica bands cannot produce. Peyton Soileau on guitar adds the second string voice that deepens the harmonic and melodic complexity of the arrangements, and Bernard Brown’s drums provide the rhythmic logic that all of it is built on. Every one of these six people is present in the sound of Counting of the Coup, not as separate contributors assembled in post-production but as a functioning unit caught in the act of being themselves together.
All of the songs on the album were written by Jack Miller, whose compositional work across the ten tracks demonstrates a blues songwriting sensibility that understands the tradition deeply enough to work within it with genuine invention rather than imitation. The character studies and narrative pieces that anchor several of the tracks reflect a literary instinct for the kind of specific human detail that transforms a song about a type of person into a song about a person, the small criminal who thinks he is bigger than he is and the legendary outlaw who has become myth over time existing in the same imaginative space, the present and the historical sitting side by side in a catalog that treats blues as a living form rather than a museum piece.
Rico Gillette opens the album with the kind of character who inhabits the margins of the worlds that blues has always documented most honestly, the small-time petty criminal with an inflated self-conception, the gap between who he thinks he is and who he actually is providing both the song’s humor and its sadness. This is blues storytelling in the Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker tradition, the character portrait as a form of social observation, the individual life rendered with enough specificity to reveal something about the broader environment that produced it. Dead Mingo follows with the energy that the album sustains across its ten tracks, the live recording capturing the momentum of a band that has been playing these songs long enough to trust them completely while remaining alert enough to the moment that the performances feel fresh rather than routine.
Funny Looking Flowers and A Good Day sit in the more lyrical and melodic territory of the album, tracks that demonstrate the range of what Jack Miller’s songwriting is capable of beyond the character studies. A Good Day in particular carries the quality that the blues has always paradoxically contained within its darker tendencies, the genuine appreciation for a day when things go right that is only fully felt by people who have experienced enough days when they did not. Waiting on That Call extends the narrative mode into the territory of anticipation and uncertainty, the specific experience of the blues of suspension rather than loss, the thing not yet having happened that might change everything.
19th Degree Blues introduces the twelve-bar form’s more complex and historically rooted cousin, the specific idiom of the degree suggesting both musical formalism and the Louisiana fraternal tradition that runs through the culture of Eunice and southwest Louisiana as a cultural inheritance. The Valley Below is among the album’s most ambitious narrative pieces, the myth of Joachim the Mexican outlaw drawn from the early history of the southwestern borderlands carried into a contemporary blues arrangement that gives the historical figure the sonic treatment his mythological status deserves. This is blues as a vehicle for regional and historical memory as well as personal experience, the tradition’s capacity for storytelling expanded to include stories from a time before the music that now tells them existed in its current form.
Keep the Flame Alive and Boudin Blues return to the more immediate and geographically specific territory of southwest Louisiana, the boudin of the second title being the Cajun pork sausage that is as much a cultural identifier as a food product in this part of the world, the kind of specific reference that roots a song in a place and a people rather than in the abstracted blues landscape that more generic recordings tend to inhabit. This Morning closes the album with the quality of a final statement made in the morning light, the appropriate hour for a blues record that was recorded live at a weekly residency to reach its conclusion, the beginning of a new day arriving after everything that preceded it.
The recurring question that one of Dulva’s bandmates delivers with a smirk before many songs begin, have we done this before, is the perfect encapsulation of what Counting of the Coup actually represents. The smirk indicates that the question is not entirely serious, that the players know the songs, that the uncertainty is performed rather than genuine. But there is something in the asking of it that captures the live recording philosophy that produced this album, the recognition that even familiar material is different every time you play it, that a song recorded live without overdubs is always being played for the first time in the sense that matters, the specific configuration of these six people at this moment in this room is not a repetition of any previous performance but its own unrepeatable event. Honest music from the heart, made by people who show up every week because showing up is what musicians who mean it do.
