Showing posts with label Tom Waits. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tom Waits. Show all posts

Aug 30, 2019

Country Fantasy Football Team Names 2019


The NFL gets rolling soon, so it's fantasy football draft time! Here are some (mostly country) music-related fantasy football team names by me and some of FTM's Twitter pals. Any that aren't credited here were come up with by me or Jeremy Harris. You're welcome to steal them because you probably aren't in the same leagues...

Ever Lovin’ Handoff (Jeremy Harris’ actual team name)

Le’Ve’on the Road Again

Beer, Weed, Pooches

Red Solo Kupp

Gurley Shake it For Me

Drake Farm

4th Down Road - Derek Hudgin

Well Well Well My Michel

Between JuJu and Jones

Who Dat Man

Once, Guice, Three Times a Lady

Good Lord Leonard

She Got the Goldmine, I Got First Pick in the Draft - Michael Fenton

Damn Good Feeling to Run These Routes

The Old Jackass Farts

Fleaflicker Greenwood 

Goodbye Earl Thomas

Kerryon My Wayward Son

To Beat The Devil In The 40

Ain’t Nothin’ Wrong With Antonio

No Place Too Farve

The Devil’s Right Defensive End

Take Mahomes Country Roads - Alex Williams

Odell Watson’s Chicken Shit Touchdown 

Luke Bryan Sucks

Cody Jinksonville Jaguars 

Trubisky Myers

Have Gun, Will Fumble

Tom (Brady) Waits for an open receiver 

First Down (in a 10 Year Town)

It Gets the Ertz at Night

Goff’s Gonna Cut You Down

Bortles All the Way Down - Jay Arnold
Pancho & Leftwich - Jay Arnold
Lady Mayfield - Jay Arnold
Roethlisberger in Paradise - Jay Arnold

Dak That Azz Up

Mahomes in Alabama

Heart of Gould - Nate

Apr 18, 2019

Rod Melancon: The Farce the Music Interview

Photos by Barry Grimes
Interview by Kasey Anderson


You were born in Louisiana and the culture and sound of the bayou comes through clearly throughout Pinkville, but you spent a few years in Los Angeles, specifically around the Grand Ole Echo scene, which is still an under-the-radar scene compared to Nashville or Austin. How did big a role did Los Angeles, and that specific scene, play in your development as a writer and artist?


Los Angeles played a major role being that I had already moved there when I started fooling with songwriting. I was 19 when I first started trying to structure my own songs. I remember around age 21 putting the guitar down. It would be a year or so before I’d get back into it. Around age 24, I got introduced to the Grand Ole Echo scene.  Ben Reddell started a label and funded/released my first record Parish Lines. I was big into the folks that hung around there. Dan Janisch, Bob Woodruff, Rick Shea and David Serby. These guys were 20 to 25 years older than me but they sort of took me under their wing. I looked up to them and I still do. Check out Bob Woodruff’s Dreams and Saturday Nights. It’s a great record that was released in the mid-90s through Asylum. Dan Janisch was and still is one of my favorite songwriters in L.A. “Cannot Settle Down”, “I Dream of You” and “Everybody Gots Somebody They Used to Love” are stone cold classics. I believe Mike Stinson still covers Dan’s songs. The Cinema Bar in Culver City was my favorite hang. Julie Richmond and Kim Grant guided me into the scene there. I’ll always have a special place for L.A. It gave me my start and awoke something in me I never knew was there.


Cinema Bar's a cool place. Didn't some legendary Lucinda Williams show take place there? I don't know if I have that right. And the Echo was a really cool scene, still is. I know you've talked about seeing Phoebe Bridgers there early on in her career, when you and I first met you said you'd seen me play the Echo years before. A lot of the folks who started out there strayed a little further from Americana into, I dunno, whatever other made-up genre you want to use to classify them.


Your sound, though, and especially the sound of Pinkville, doesn't immediately bring to mind Los Angeles. These are dark songs, and you and Adrian Quesada did a great job on this record of framing your voice really nicely. How did you connect with Adrian and Will Walden, and when you started writing the songs for this record, did you have that kind of darkness in mind?


I met Will through the music scene in Echo Park around 4 or 5 years ago. He used to do sound at the Silver Lake Lounge. He was only 21 years old. We’ve been playing together for over three years now. It’s funny to think about that all these years later. He’s been on every tour I’ve done. He’s my right hand man. Interesting fact: His dad is renowned tv composer Snuffy Walden. Snuffy composed and won an Emmy for The West Wing. My favorite of his is The Wonder Years score. Will inherited that trait. A few years ago I was talking to him about what I envisioned as a record intro. “Picture a platoon cautiously walking through the humid jungles of Vietnam.” He came up with the riff on the spot. That riff would eventually become the opening track of Pinkville. I connected to Adrian Quesada through Mary Jurey at Blue Elan. It’s funny because he told me recently that at first he didn’t think he was the guy to produce me. He said he thought I was more of a country/Americana artist. After I described my vision to him he changed his mind.  After the last record, I told myself I’d lighten up on the dark subject matter but in the end I created something even darker than the last. I guess it’s just who I am. I gravitate more towards those kind of characters. I read In Cold Blood at a very young age. I guess it stuck.


I read In Cold Blood pretty young, too. That one and Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried both come to mind throughout Pinkville. How much do you draw from outside material - books, films, news, whatever? Everything around us has a way of informing what we write but how often does something you've read or seen jump out at you to the point where you chase it down until it becomes a song? What's that process like for you?


Yeah, I read The Things They Carried right before I started working on Pinkville. I loved the mixture of brutality and tenderness. That last chapter really got me. The opening track of Pinkville was something I experienced at a young age. It stuck with me and eventually I was able to put that story in to a song. My writing process on this record was different because I pulled a lot of things from my personal life. Rehabilitation, Pinkville, Manic Depression. I am the narrator in those songs. That is something I usually wasn’t comfortable with but with age and experience it came naturally. I am inspired by lots of things. Personal experiences, books, films. Some things just come out of nowhere. Cobra came out of nowhere. I wrote the lyrics late one night. Those are the most mysterious and interesting ones to me.  No explanation on why I did it or where it came from.


There's a very plainspoken approach to some of that autobiographical material. Which isn't to say there aren't great turns of phrase or really beautiful lines it's just that a lot of it is matter-of-fact. "Rehabilitation" sticks out to me as really just a recounting of the day-to-day of rehab. It's not bereft of redemption but that's not really the point of the song. It's a kind of dirt-under-the-fingernails recounting of your experience. Was that the intent? To de-romanticize and de-stigmatize rehab by laying the process out so plainly?


Exactly. Rehab is the same schedule over and over for weeks. The rhythm and groove stays the same. Though there is the occasional “oh lawd” moment. A patient escapes, a patient gets pregnant. A few months after I was out a close friend I met there overdosed. I remember during a session, they asked me to play a song. I played “Feathers.” After, he came up to me and asked me about that song. “How in the hell did you come up with that?”  Three months later he was dead. “I can still see his face when they broke down the door....”


It's sort of the same way with "The Heartbreakers". Was that another instance of trying to humanize something that seems much larger than life?


Totally. I envisioned it as a Tom Petty origin story. Will started playing the riff on tour a few years ago. It was before Tom died. After he passed away I knew I had to finish the lyrics. I relate with his story because we both grew up in the swampy Deep South. We both moved to Hollywood at a young age. Not trying to sound like Robert Ford in The Assassination of Jesse James but I related with his story a lot. It felt like the right thing to do and it’s nice seeing folks react so positively to it.



The reach of those songs and that band is just immense, so it was nice to see you distill it back down to its origins. Do you feel like that dream they were chasing still exists? When you moved from LA back to Texas, did you feel like you'd done what you could in LA and needed a change? What took you to Austin?


I’m not sure if that rock n roll dream still exists. I’m sure some form of it does. I got signed in L.A. so that’s proof that’s it not completely dead yet. Every time we’d tour through Austin it was always amazing. Saturday nights at The White Horse. Making more money in one night than I ever did in L.A. The bands and songwriters are great. It’s also a genreless city. Folks would ask if I was worried about being surrounded by so many great bands. Honestly, I WANT to be surrounded by great bands. It’s inspiring. Folks that treat music as a competition are high. Townes did his thing here and so did Roky Erickson. Best of both worlds. Niels from Blue Elan had been telling me I should make the move. He said check back in with me in two years and let me know if you made the right decision. It took me less than a year to realize I had.


It's a special place, for sure. Portland took its little slogan, Keep Portland Weird, from Austin. The whole "Keep it Weird" thing started there in Austin as a call for folks to support local businesses and was then adopted by a few other cities, Portland among them.


You've been public about your sobriety -- obviously "Rehabilitation" references that -- and about mental health issues. How have sobriety and treatment changed the way you write and perform, if at all. Do you approach songwriting differently than you did before you got sober?


I’m much more focused now that I’m sober. Nothing to cloud my brain or throw me off course. My personal life settled down so I was able to focus on songwriting and my career. It helped me mature and my responsibility level went up. Folks ask how do I stay sober playing in bars and venues. Honestly that keeps me sober. Nothing against folks that drink but it caused a lot of unnecessary pain in my life. No one to blame but myself. The guilt is still there. I feel bad for the way I treated people that cared for me. That guilt will probably never leave but I’m thankful I can wake up knowing I have no one to apologize to and I can remember everything from the night before. Hell of a thing.



Hell of a thing indeed. Tom Waits, who you cover on Pinkville, is a sober guy and when asked about sobriety affecting his songwriting process, he said, "One is never completely certain when you drink and do drugs whether the spirits that are moving through you are the spirits from the bottle or your own. And, at a certain point, you become afraid of the answer. That's one of the biggest things that keeps people from getting sober, they're afraid to find out that it was the liquor talking all along." I've always really liked that quote. If you know how to do it, you know how to do it. It seems like Waits is a pretty big touchstone for you, creatively. What drew you to his songs and, specifically, to "Goin' Out West"?


I love the theater and monologues of Tom Waits. He’s a visual artist and really paints the scene. I gravitated to Goin Out West because of the subject matter. A brute of a man is pitching himself to Hollywood. The traits he brags about are mostly criminal but at least he looks good without a shirt. Y’all get that dude an agent! I related with it because I too moved to Hollywood with hopes of being in the moving pictures. I was in a handful of really bad films. “I ain’t no extra I’m a leading man.”


Part of that song too, though, is the folly of the narrator thinking that what the people "out West" want is a renegade, an outlaw, when what they really want is a soft, beautiful face upon which to project the image of an outlaw. The juxtaposition of real danger and the illusion of danger is really at the heart of Waits's thing, I think. And we see that not just in Hollywood but in this idea of Outlaw Country, a sub-genre of a sub-genre of music that, I guess, both you and I play. People love the idea of an outlaw - they love the outlaw image and the iconography that does along with it - but when somebody actually steps up and speaks their mind, be it about the president or how under-represented female artists are on country radio, or whatever, people get uncomfortable. That's kind of a bizarre thing to me. The flipside of that is we now have this glut of artists who work very hard to present a very calculated representation of the outlaw image they believe people want to see. It's nothing new in music or film, or life even, but it seems to be prevalent again, this idea of the outlaw persona. You seem to have found a label and a team that don't try to push that on you, or push your songs into that categorization. Is that a boundary you set with the label?


I agree 100 percent on that. The label has been great about me doing my thing when it comes to the music part since the beginning. I’m very thankful for that after hearing so many label horror stories. Folks love playing dress up. A doctored up “outlaw” bio or trying to appear a certain way. One of my favorite Sturgill lines is “The most outlaw thing that I ever did was give a good woman a ring.” I’m far from an “outlaw.” Maybe outlaw in the fact that I make records my own way. Though I still enjoy playing Xbox and hold a large amount of Middle Earth knowledge. Some of these folks would never want to appear “nerdy” or admit that they enjoy these things. One of my favorite spots in Austin is I Heart Video. Tons of VHS tapes and film memorabilia. I’m also much more comfortable in a pair of Nike Cortez than cowboy boots. Sure I’ve had a few run ins with the law but I’m more embarrassed by that than proud.


To me it's always, if the songs are good, I don't care much about how they're presented or marketed. That said, you do seem to have a pretty good hold on how to be engaging on Twitter and Instagram without being panderous or persistently self-promotional. Is that a hard balance to strike for you? How do you strike that balance?

Thankfully as far as that goes I’ve been able to just be myself. The older I got the less I cared about my “online” image. That’s when I noticed folks started paying attention. Most people can tell when someone isn’t being authentic. Authenticity always shines through in the end. Whether it’s through song or social media. I enjoy that side of it. I’m surprised when folks react to things that I post. The world has a better sense of humor than I originally thought.


I think that authenticity comes across.


The record's out, you're going to Scandinavia again soon on tour, and I imagine you'll be busy this summer. Pinkville is more or less going to be your life for the next 18 months or so. Does that take a toll on you? Do you hit a point where you're ready for the next thing or have you adjusted to the timing of the album cycle at this point?


This time it was different because I felt like it was the most well prepared release yet. The team was all set, the artwork was there and a Europe and US tour was booked. I’m already seeing the difference that makes. It takes a big load off of me. I enjoy being on the road. I’ve got a great new booking agent now through Atomic. His name is Jimmy Dasher. How can you go wrong when that’s your agent’s name? I’ve done a lot of questionable tours. 4 great shows and 15 bad shows was usually the case. Though this all builds character. You have to go through this. It’s the hustle. Folks want immediate fame through reality tv music competitions. Even if you win, you are usually forgotten within a few weeks. Careers are earned on the road. Whether you are playing to 5 people or 50 people, it’s the necessary path and what it takes to build a foundation. Cue Bob Seger’s “Turn the Page”.

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Pinkville is out now!

Dec 10, 2018

New Blood: Nichole Wagner

By Robert Dean

A few nights ago, I stumbled into a Tom Waits night at one of our local haunts, The Volstead, down here in lovely Austin, Texas. The night as a whole was entertaining; the Volstead has a creepy lounge vibe, so the context was perfect. And for a free show, the artists who played a few songs impressed me. They all worked the Waits-ian thing of being a little oddball with their delivery, working the room for the jokes and banter lost somewhere in the shadows or cobwebs. 

If any cities can pull off a Tom Waits night, Austin is definitely on the short list. 

One of those singers that I immediately enjoyed was Nichole Wagner. After belting out two Tom Waits tunes with a country twang, I wanted to hear what her original music sounded like. 

On Wagner’s latest record And The Sky Caught Fire, the excitement for her music is validated. The country twang is in full effect, offering a little slice of Kacey Musgraves older songs, mixed with a little bit of The Civil Wars concerning vocal approach. 

And The Sky Caught Fire feels very “Austin” with its production sensibilities, but also has a slight poppy feel to it, as well. While I sincerely enjoy Wagner’s vocals and songwriting ability, I was a little underwhelmed with the backing band. Something about “The Rules of Baseball” and “Let Me Know” has a darkness that’s not on front street, but permeates the air. Because of that internal expectation, I’d like to hear what Wagner could do with a band who was sonically closer to Jason Isbell’s 400 Unit or whoever is backing Margo Price. 

Music nerd gripes aside, And The Sky Caught Fire is a solid country/Americana record. The production is bright, and the craftsmanship is there. If you’re looking for something that you could throw on while cooking dinner, this has that sensibility, which having a few good dinner records is never a bad thing. For a first record, this is a fine place to start kicking. At a slim 35 minutes, Wagner packs in a lot of punch in just a short amount of time. 


If you’re down here in Texas, I’d suggest giving Nichole Wagner a shot out in the clubs. She handled those Tom Waits songs with velvet gloves and made them her own, which was transfixing. I’m definitely going to catch her live because I have a suspicion she’s capable of throwing fire when it’s her songs we’re listening to. 

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And the Sky Caught Fire is available on Bandcamp, Amazon, Spotify, etc. 



Sep 19, 2018

No Sleep Roundup: Misfits, Martha Spencer, Social D, etc.


By Robert Dean

What’s up, folks? 

Today, I have had a stellar day. Rarely do my days kick major ass, but today, my Vans slip-on connected with just enough of the world’s cheek. So, because of that, I’m in a good mood. Why did I have such a good day? 

A.    I got tickets for the Misfits in Chicago. I’m a mega fanboy with a Crimson Ghost tattoo as most aging punk rockers do, and I am beyond thrilled to finally scream my lungs out to “Hybrid Moments” up close and personal. 

B.    I acquired a family heirloom: my grandmother’s 1951 Rockola jukebox that’s been fully restored. It’s as cool as you imagine it is. I lost my grandma to cancer at age 54 in 1996, so seeing the little tags for the songs in her handwriting, and knowing that she picked all of the vinyl blows my mind. Us music geeks love this stuff.



C.    Got a new puppy. Her name is Mia Wallace, and she’s cute as fuck. 



As for the usual, let’s get into it. 

Martha Spencer has a new S/T record dropping. The tracks are backwoods, traditionalist country that you’d expect from a gal that hails from deep in Appalachia. It’s campy and fun, and worth checking out. Spencer has a vibe similar to the Carter Family. I dove into some of her projects, and she’s most definitely a product of a different era. She can play a wide variety of instruments, sing, and probably do 56 other things, too. Give her a spin if you’re looking for some honky tonkin’ tunes that are 100% stuff to get your two-step on, on a funky Friday night. 

Wayne Graham has a newish record, Joy out, and it’s got all of the feels. If you’re a Ryan Adams or My Morning Jacket kind of person, this is right up your audio alley. The tunes on Joy feel like they’re from a mid-90’s obscure alt-country act, and that suits me just fine. The world needs more records that don’t feel like they’ve dabbled in a little too much Radiohead but instead stick to a few solid tunes that kick you straight in the ass. 


If that description appeals to you, then you’ll eat this up, Joy is a collection of head bobbers that feel like they were the background music in a road movie where some guy screams alone in the rain after his girlfriend betrays him. 

In live show news, if you get the chance to catch Social Distortion on this tour – DO IT. The boys are out on the road, and killing cities left and right. My man in New Orleans said they smoked tonight, and last week in Austin, they were relentless. If you’re a deep cut, hardcore Social Distortion geek like I am, you’ll be enthralled. No S/T songs. 

Instead of “Ball and Chain” or “Story of My Life,” you’ll get “Don’t Drag Me Down,” “Don’t Take Me For Granted,” “Angel’s Wings,” and are opening with “Reach For The Sky.” If that doesn’t set a tone, what does? Also, they’re playing a few new tunes, and “Born to Kill” is a smoker that rivals anything off “White Heat”, which is easily their heaviest record. 


Tom Waits has a new song. It sounds like Tom Waits. I love it because I love depressing music. 

Lana Del Rey has two new songs out. They sound like Lana Del Rey. I love it because, in my head, all of her music sounds like Hollywood murder scenes

Yesterday, Amy Winehouse would have been 35, and that totally sucks. She was too good for this world. Alcohol is a hard mistress. 

That’s it. Stay creepy.


Oct 3, 2016

Album Review: James Leg - Blood on the Keys

A review by Robert Dean

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For today’s review, I’m going cold turkey. The head honcho, the Trailerparkman himself, sent me this here James Leg guy’s new record. In an effort toward compelling journalism, I’m going to abstain from Googling if Ol’ James here has other records, or if he’s in any bands* I might know. As it stands, I am currently unfamiliar with James Leg and his new record, Blood on The Keys. For your reading pleasure, I’m gonna break down every track on the record. Figure let’s mix it up.
Update: I just jammed the fuck OUT to the record’s first track, Human Lawn Dart. This is some good stuff. Like, really, really good. It’s like if Tom Waits smoked some major Kush and played a juice harp. It’s hyped up, drugged out but not lame and too overtly psychedelic. It’s got enough Stooges going on to keep it rock and roll.
Track 2, Hugging the Line is more straight forward. It’s a frantic foot stomper and hand clapper. I like songs like this live because one can only assume by this dude’s Lemmy stache’ he goes hard in the paint.
Mighty Man is pretty indie-rockish with the obvious Tom Waits vocal thing going on, but it’s a lighthearted swing.
St. Michael Shuffle has a different vibe than the previous tracks. It feels like a drunk hotel bar musician going haywire. It feels like a cheap suit and cowboy boots, or spilling a drink on a man and then fighting in him the bathroom.
I’ll Take It is pretty mellow. Wasn’t feeling it. Skipped it. I like this dude when he’s playing fast and getting weird. This was too focused and ballad-y. I’m all about this dude’s party tunes, not his bummers.
Track six, Ain’t You Hungry sounds like a Scorsese fight scene or someone driving on a highway coked out of their skulls. Maybe someone having a blurry, drunken night at the bar and they wake up in a pool of someone else’s blood and with strange money in their pockets.
Dogjaw sounds like it was written about or in Austin, Texas. It’s a snotty bar room preacher of a jammer -definitely one of the better tracks on the record. Think the guitar from Magic Carpet Ride meets early ZZ Top.
Tao Te Leg was a little too 80’s synth for me. It’s cool enough, I guess, but kinda like if Dire Straights wanted to play in dive bars instead of Mark Knopfler ripping your head off with his badassery. (Side convo: when’s the last time you jammed some Dire Fuckin’ Straits? You probably need to.)
Blood on the Keys is one of those Nick Cave gospel-sounding deals. I skipped it.
Should’ve Been Home With You was a better song than the aforementioned Blood on The Keys. Feels like a revocation, a reckoning. This is a good song to close it out with. It’s approximately Tom Waits without coming off lame.
Overall, I’d say this James Leg fella has a solid record on his hands. If you’re looking for a great piece of music to have on while cooking or drinking some beers while working on your car, I’d say this one was worth picking up. It’s not a party record, but instead, it’s a single record to get lost with instead of using it as social bait. Give Blood on The Keys a shot. Leave us some tweets, let us know what you think.  

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Blood on the Keys is available on iTunes, Amazon, etc.
*Black Diamond Heavies, per Trailer

Jun 16, 2016

Killers, Open Country, and Gun Smoke: Robert Dean’s The Red Seven Playlist

Farce the Music contributor Robert Dean is not only our resident gonzo reviewer of all things punk, hardcore, and Americana, he's also an author. His novel The Red Seven (which I'm about to start reading) is a "Southern Gothic western" full of violence, revenge, and intrigue. Here, he provides a soundtrack (and a Spotify playlist!) for his book. -Trailer

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When you write a book, you’re alone, like all the time. You spend so many hours locked away; it’s just you, your thoughts and many times, the music. Music is central to my creative process. It means the world to me. I’m always thinking about music, about what a song means, how it feels, the texture of the song to the moment.

When I wrote The Red Seven, I tried to capture a spirit. I wanted the main hombre, The Ghost to be ruthless, but I wanted to give him gravitas – a sense that he thrived in chaos. I listened to music that had guts, soul – stuff that held weight in its hands.

The Ghost, along with the villains of the book aren’t paper tigers, they’re layered characters. Music helped visualize and give flaws to some of them. Maybe it was a nod to Keith Richards, or a twang of Otis Rush – all of it’s in there, in the words. 

The Red Seven isn’t just about revenge and killing; it’s about the human experience and what loss does to someone. It’s about how losing someone you love in senseless was changes how you function, how you feel. That’s at the heart of The Red Seven. Is it a fast paced page turner? Hell yeah, it is. But, it’s all got moments of reality that even though they’re from back in the day, those moments never change – they’re everlasting because we’re human, and the animalistic spirit never leaves us. Whether fucking or fighting, we revert; it’s in our DNA. That’s a symbolic way to look at The Ghost – stalking with purpose. 

This playlist I’ve created reflects my moods when creating the book when creating this world. I’m not wild about contemporary music invading a time and place in the past. But, this playlist represents what the book feels like. What the scenes feel like. What bars, what sex, what violence sounds like. I wanted to take a musical journey and take the readers of the book along for the ride. So, if you’ve got an ache for a new book to read, pick up a copy of The Red Seven and pop on this playlist. Maybe you’ll see some shades you’d never imagined while driving deep into a vicious world.

Please check out my Spotify playlist. I spent a shitload of time on this.



~Robert Dean


Vengeance Gonna Be My Name – Slackeye Slim
Wayfaring Stranger - Jack White
Can the Circle be Unbroken – The Carter Family
Lungs - Townes Van Zandt
I Saw The Light- Hank Williams
Sins Of My Father – Tom Waits
Sleepwalk - Santo and Johnny
To be Treated Right - Terry Reid
A Whiter Shade Of Pale - Procol Harum
Midnight Rider – The Allman Brothers
Death Letter Blues -Son House
Loving Cup – Rolling Stones
‪I Can’t Quit you Baby - Otis Rush

‪It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels – Kitty Wells
Nights in White Satin – The Moody Blues
Loan Me A Dime - Boz Scaggs & Duane Allman
Rollin’ and Tumblin’ - Elmore James
First Time I Met The Blues – Buddy Guy
Machine Gun - Jimi Hendrix
Angel Flying Too Close to The Ground – Willie Nelson
Life By The Drop - Doyle Bramhall


Jun 6, 2016

Album Review: Hesitation Wounds - Awake for Everything

Review by Robert Dean

 In the pre-“our lives being dominated by Internet” age of the late 90’s, early 00’s – something in hardcore was happening. A sound organically grew, one that had metal flair, but a sense of chaos that was far beyond punk, but community minded, but was rooted in being artistic, but was driven by a different sense of spirit. Bands like American Nightmare and Turmoil were ripping off heads and not giving a single goddamn who got in the way.

Bands like Deadguy, Botch, Burn it Down, Kiss It Goodbye, Candiria, Burnt By The Sun, The National Acrobat, Coalesce, Converge sprung up, to name a small few. These bands had an off-kilter sense of dynamics, they played to the downbeat, and wrote songs that were unique, were powerful.

Bands like Hatebreed or Throwdown were committed to the chug; these groups came from a completely different crop. You got the sound, or you didn’t – and that’s what made it perfect. It was challenging but so rhythmic, so pure. The sounds weren’t about the droning riff; it was about turning from circle pit madness to absolute crushing riff that Dimebag would have chugged a beer over.

Back then we experimented with all kinds of ideas in music, statements by bands who were influenced by art and Tom Waits instead of just Bad Brains on repeat. There were Straight Edge bands, and we all went through Straight Edge phases, while others kept legit to the party – Christians, Krishna’s, Vegans, whatever. It was a quilt of ideas, notions and it all worked.

But, like all things, many of the bands of the era drifted off into lore or unwarranted obscurity (if you can find anything by Indiana hardcore slayers Burn it Down, that’s an immediate purchase amigo). Converge is still around, but Coalesce and Botch are the things of “I was at X show” or “I was a year too late on them” which totally sucks. Fortunately, like all things cyclical a batch of bands are popping up that are carrying on the torch of that era of hardcore. And if you’re a lover of all things dissonant and vitriolic – you need Hesitation Wounds in your life.

I’d be remiss to say Hesitation Wounds are just some scrappy kids who were influenced by the aforementioned bands. Instead, Hesitation Wounds is a murder’s row of hardcore heavy hitters. Featuring former and current members of The Hope Conspiracy, Torche Amore, Suicide File and Trap Them - this ain’t exactly a pack of nobodies. Sure, there’s the elephant in the room of Jay Weinberg currently playing in Slipknot, but whatever – dude is getting paid. But let us not forget he played in Madball, and Against Me! Prior to donning a sweaty ass mask – his punk rock acumen is very much there.



On Hesitation Wounds first full-length record, Awake for Everything we’re treated with chaotic riffs, supercharged drumming, fuzzed out bass and vocals that could peel the paint off a living room wall. Awake for Everything is a harken back to that pure sound of the early 00’s when music was created in a vacuum when you had no idea what kids across the state were doing unless you went to their show.

Awake for Everything is like a love letter to an era when bands meant something to the kids at the shows when no one was there to see some dork whip out his eight string and imitate Meshuggah. Instead, it’s a directionless, cunning fucking masterstroke. I say directionless because it doesn’t feel contrived or concocted. It feels natural, constructed out of a basement while sipping PBR’s and arguing about which Sabbath record is the best. The songs can go anywhere, and change direction within seconds.

There is absolutely no point in picking out a standout track. This record doesn’t need that. What it needs is people to buy it, to own it, to love it and hopefully get these guys in a van on tour. Awake for Everything is the record folks my age have been waiting to be released, it’s a time capsule back to the heyday, but doesn’t feel like some forced thing that’s bloated and dishonest. Instead, Hesitation Wounds sounds like the band every musician over 33 talks about wanting to start but is always too busy with adult life shit. It’s so damned perfect.

Will kids in their early 20’s get Hesitation Wounds? I can’t say. I sincerely hope they do. Will folks in their later 30’s get it? You bet your life we will. If and when the band tours, you’ll see me there. Not up front, though. I don’t want anyone to spill my drink. I’ll be in the back gracefully nodding my head and remembering what it was like to be lucky enough to go to shows before everyone video’d every fucking thing.

Get off my lawn. Buy Awake for Everything at this very second.

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Available at Amazon and all the usual spots.


Not edited by lazy editor in chief

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