I’m goin’ straight to hell, ain’t nothing slowing me down

Hank Williams III: Straight to Hell

Hank Williams casts such a long shadow over every country musician to follow that being his grandson, the third generation in the business, must be like operating in pitch darkness at all times. To say Hank Williams III is concerned with the legacy and history of country music is like saying the ocean contains water. As such, the current state of mainstream country music is an enormous affront to him. The pop-country likes of Dixie Chicks and Shania Twain, as well as country-appropriating parasites like Kid Rock may be painful to us but to him they are a blot on his family, a disgrace to everything he has ever held dear.

So that is what Straight to Hell is all about, really. How great country was, how great country legends from his grandfather to Hasil Adkins remain, and what a pathetically awful pool of piss country music is turning into in the mainstream. This is not a purist country album, but it is pure in spirit, these are songs about drinking, fighting, and being so depressed that all you can do is drink and fight. That’s raw, classic shit. He even starts off the album with The Louvin Brothers’s classic “Satan Is Real” (not a cover, just the actual song there to start things). His backing band are pure country gold, fast as Speedy West and just as genuine and vigorous.

This is a visceral album. If classic outlaw country is your thing, then you are the intended audience, although the attitude leans a bit to Hank III’s punk side. “Country Heroes” is a slow, dark song about ’sitting here getting wasted just like my country heroes’ and Straight to Hell does have a clear appraisal of country’s legacy of being miserable and ornery, of alcohol, depression and violence as the key themes, and Hank III is unapologetically country. I mean, this is the kind of dude who you’d run into in a shitty bar who’d be a pissed-off mean drunk who’d kick the shit out of you for your silly haircut and you’d hardly want to hang with him if you weren’t likewise, but it’s honest, it’s tough, and it really fucking rocks. It’s odd to say so about something so dyed-in-the-wool country, but man it rocks.

The second disc has a strong country blues song, “Louisiana Stripes” and then a bizarre forty minute sound-collage that is purely a drug experience. A handful of songs, some extremely slowed-down or with heavy tape-damage, interspersed with train noise and horses and pigs and heartbeats and such. Make of it what you will.

77% => ****

~ by jshopa on May 23, 2008.