Cattletruck

Bourbon & Black Crepe

by Dave Pilot

So you find yourself these days listening to the new Drams record and wondering when Brent Best turned into a John Lennon wannabe.  You keep giving this year’s Drive-By Trucker’s release a spin, hoping to find even a tiny bit of Patterson Hood’s old chicken-fried machismo and angst.  And you keep coming up short.  You wonder what day exactly it was that all the damn rock music in Americana died.  You try to figure out where the darkness went.  Why nobody’s pissed off anymore.  And where the hell to get some brutal insight without self-righteous political commentary.

If this is you, Cattletruck is now your band.  Their self-released debut CD carries all of the anger and power and insight of anything the above acts ever released, and combines them all with guitar god histrionics that would make Yngwie Malmsteen proud.  You can thank Charlotte, NC’s Trip Rogers for that.  A grizzled veteran of the NC music scene, Trip can make a six-string sing in ways that evoke the best of the great 70’s bands while sounding entirely fresh and new.  Therein lies much of the band’s appeal.  But the glue that holds it all together lies in Jud Block’s lyrics.  Need to hear somebody get called out for turning into a blathering fool?  See “Steve Earle’s Blues.”

"Well I’ve come a long way
To lose those days
Of a southern accent
Well in fact I got so good at covering it
Well I’m not quite sure where it went
So I spend most days looking left
For the topic of my next tune
Knowing damn well liberal guilt
Can’t hold a candle to that needle and that spoon

Well I only call on Townes these days
To remind me of what I used to be
Before I bought into that living legend shit
And rested on the laurels of my history"

Whatzis, you ask?  An assault on the very bastion of Americana?  Someone honestly taking on Steve Earle?  Well, yeah.  For starters.

Next up is religious fanaticism, in its worst of many horrible forms.  Taken at face value, “Cornfields and Brimstone” is just a good dark killin’ song.  Pondered in a metaphorical sense, the tale of a Nebraska farmer obsessed with the belief that his child is the Antichrist and that there’s but one way to save the world can apply to any number of big-ticket items in the morning paper.  And it’s all wrapped up in a barrage of ominous, crashing guitar work backed by a mesmerizing bass line that will curl every last hair on the back of your neck.  Par for the course where Cattletruck’s concerned.

The record’s most chilling song may be its lone ballad, “Short Straw.”  Think your relationship’s gone south?  Imagine yourself in this early morning conversation:

"Put down the gun
And I’ll put down this knife
And we’ll try to get back to a version of a normal life
Well I never held any delusion
That this would ever last
Now I’m just hopin’ to still
Be alive after breakfast

Well I never thought I’d be
In this kind of situation
It’s amazing how alcohol and ready sex
Can affect a man’s discrimination
Someone is gonna end up dead
And I fear it won’t be long
So before I draw the short straw
I’m gonna cover my ass and get myself gone"

As you might expect, there are plenty of songs here that wrestle with the agonizing demon of alcohol.  “Next Excuse” brings to the table a brutal exposition of the wary tango with the bottle that we haven’t heard since Gary Stewart was recording his conversations with Jack Daniel’s, or at the least since Joe Croker gave us “Mighty Hard Pleasure.”  And “Drinkin’ On Sunday,” well, it’s just what “Sunday Morning Comin’ Down” would have sounded like if Johnny Cash had been really pissed:

"The sun comes up and I know
George Harrison is full of shit
Close my eyes tighter and think
Well if this is heaven
The fuckin’ Baptists can have it

And then a chorus later, we get this:

The preacher says…
The priest says…
Yeah why in the hell should I care?
Their lives are gonna be just the same
Whether or not I’m there
I’m havin’ a little trouble with God
Yeah, you talk about a deadbeat dad
A full bottle of Jameson’s the only father I ever had
Well let’s have another round
You know it really don’t matter anyway
Broken promises
Make it easier to drink on Sunday"

It’s a brutal, bitter little record, this one.  It’s also insightful, probing, and intelligent on a level rarely seen anywhere in the music business these days.  Cattletruck will question your faith and question your beliefs and make no apologies for stoking the firing of every synapse in your brain.  They will make you think, deeply, about just exactly who and what you are – and why.  And they offer this introspective service on an aural buffet that’s worth the price of admission on its own.  Somewhere between Badger’s bass work, Trip’s axe mastery, and Jud’s vocals (which sound, frankly, as if Townes Van Zandt were fronting Lucifer’s own house band), the musical components finds a cohesion that drives the searing lyrics white-hot and unerring into your soul. There are minor complaints, to be sure, on the cosmetic scale.  It’s an independent recording, and the production doesn’t fully do it justice.  Occasional vocals get missed, or go flat.  But this isn’t a band that’s on stage to be pretty.  They want to make you think.  They want you to stop and take stock.  They want to get inside your head.  And since Slobberbone’s demise, no one’s done exactly that any better.

You can find out for yourself at www.myspace.com/cattletruck.  Don’t let the grass grow on your way.  You won’t regret it.
                                                                                           

Written by Dave Pilot, November, 2006

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