Albums

Album Review: Hayseed Dixie

Album: No Covers
Label: Pinnacle

This is Hayseed Dixie like you’ve never heard them before. It’s all original material and now with the added oomph of electrics and tub-thumping. Opening track, ‘Bouncing Betty Boogie’, is a fine example of the direction of this album. At first it appears to be an innocent number about chatting up a loose girl in a bar but turns out to be a semi-serious pastiche on land-mines. Vocalist/guitarist, Barley Scotch, explains that on a flight he was seated next to what turned out to be an American arms dealer who proudly displayed a weapons catalogue. “Somewhere around page 20-something I got to the M-16 Anti-Personnel Mine, nicknamed the Bouncing Betty. Hell, there was a studio picture of it backed by crushed velvet. I ran into the airplane toilet and wrote the words to the song on a handful of toilet roll”. Suddenly the lyrics don’t seem so light-hearted – “you were built for the killing” - and this theme continues throughout with anti-government sentiment and pent-up frustration with the music industry as repeating themes.

Half the songs feature the addition of electric guitars and thumping drumbeats which add a harder edge, like on the fast and frenetic ‘Frustration’ and the Ramones-sounding ‘You’ve Got Me All Wrong Baby’. There’s still evidence of the old banjo-driven rockgrass style, ‘Gonna Be Alright’ and ‘Donkeys In Morocco’, and they even experiment with slower ballads, ‘Stephanie Come To Me Secretly’. The inspiration for the change of style comes from constantly touring with fully-kitted bands, hearing the big sound they achieve and wondering how it would change their own. They still retain their famously mischievous side which is displayed on ‘Stonewall Hicks’ - a combination of fast banjo and violin intersected with a series of ansafone messages in different languages explaining that the person isn’t answering because they are no better than pigeon excrement.

So, this is largely an experiment and it works to an extent. There’s nothing bad here, but then there’s nothing outstanding either. Those big band covers, goofy personas and ability to laugh at themselves, it seems, is where they are most comfortable so it’ll be interesting to see where they go from here.

For fans of: Ricky Skaggs, Kentucky Thunder, Ralph Stanley
Band link = Hayseed Dixie

Buy this CD!

Tags: hayseed dixie music cd album review bluegrass rockgrass banjo ricky skaggs kentucky thunder no covers

This review originally appeared in Subba-Cultcha.

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