Daniel Meade and The Flying Mules. Let Me Off At The Bottom. At The Helm Records

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Time then for Daniel Meade, Glasgow’s own hillbilly hell raiser, to raise the bar with his third official release and the first album to feature his wingmen, The Flying Mules. The Mules (Meade – guitar and piano, Lloyd Reid – guitar, Mark Ferrie – double bass, Thomas Sutherland – drums) are well kent faces locally with several regular slots in city bars and are veterans of tours with Pokey LaFarge and Sturgill Simpson. Indeed, they appeared as Simpson’s band on his latest Glasgow date, the US chart topper unsure about appearing before a Glasgow audience on his lonesome at the cavernous O2ABC. Meade himself has recently toured supporting and then playing alongside Diana Jones with several of the songs here making their first appearance. Now, hot on the heels of five packed shows in four days at the Kilkenny Roots Festival in Ireland last weekend, The Mules are set to unleash Let Me Off At The Bottom on the world.

Equally at home with Jerry Lee Lewis styled rockers and George Jones like laments Meade has the ability to take country music clichés and turn them into rockabilly poetry, the honky tonk hell raisers and beer stained weepers delivered with a Glaswegian gallusness. There are some fine examples in the rollicking There’s a Headstone Where Her heart Used To Be with Meade explaining, “Well I met lots of women on this rocky road, I love them whether long short or tall. Some for a weekend some twice as long but I still love them all.”  Of course he’s derailed by a femme fatale, a merry widow whose lips taste of candy, laughing with his friends as he looks on from beyond. It’s delivered with a vengeance, Meade’s honky tonk piano driving the song with an excellent guitar solo from Reid that’s half Les Paul, half Chet Atkins.

There are several hi-octane belters here, The Mules firing on all cylinders, the rhythm section tight as the proverbial duck, bass supple and slapping while the traps are expertly deployed. Back To Hell opens the album with a locomotive energy, Meade introducing one of the album’s themes, the demon drink, from the beginning. It’s a breathless dash from start to finish, again Reid throws in one of his seemingly  effortless solos, the notes curling from his guitar sweet as honey. Ghosts and Crocodiles has a jug band like infectiousness to it while Please Louise is a guaranteed crowd pleaser as Meade tries to back pedal from a shotgun marriage, his lyrics delivered expertly over the barrelhouse keyboards and fretboard wizardry, a Jordonaires type chorus the icing on the cake. He hasn’t learned his lesson on the avaricious rocker Lock Up You Daughter and it’s back to the drink for the closing The Bottle Called For Me, a saloon bar knockabout that ends with a good old rabble rousing chorus.

As infectious as these songs are (and a good indication of how superb the band are live) The Mules have other strings to their bow. As evidenced on his last album Meade can turn his hand to old time country songs and waltzes (as on his duet with Diana Jones on Help Me Tonight) and there’s a brace of these sadder tear stained moments on the album. Meade has an acute grasp on the topics that engaged George Jones and Hank Williams (heartbreak mostly), while his voice can convey the hurt just as well as the good times. He Should Have Been Mine laments with a fine plaintive piano and Poison Dart lopes along with some sweet guitar curls and a lonesome prairie feel. Best of all is the powerful confessional of Leave Me To Bleed, Meade, superbly accompanied by Siobhan Wilson on harmonies, reaching into the darker recesses of country music, his bride dead before the wedding, guilt and faith confused, the music a back porch funereal.

Midway twixt the light and dark there’s an excellent country ramble on Count The Roses which delves into George Jones territory with some style while the title song recalls the Everly Brothers with its harmonies. Like Pokey Lafarge, Meade has the ability to write songs that seem to have been around forever and here he’s forged a set of songs that cover a panoply of half a century of rockabilly and country music. The album’s a whirligig of rabble rousing honky tonk and forlorn laments all delivered with some panache.

Let Me Off At The Bottom is released on May 27th on At The Helm Records. There’s an album launch in Glasgow at The Rum Shack on the Southside on the 28th May.

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Austin Lucas. Between The Moon and The Midwest. At The Helm/Last Chance Records

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After the country rock rumble of  Stay Restless Austin Lucas has stumbled further down that path to come up with the glistening jewel that is Between The Moon and The Midwest. I say glistening but shimmering would do just as well as there are moments here when the music does just that, it shimmers. Sure enough it’s laden with pedal steel and ringing telecasters, the ghost of George Jones is in the mix and there are some glorious duets with Lydia Loveless but Lucas, in tandem with Glossary’s Joey Kneiser has swathed the album in a sixties like sheen. Elements of Gram Parsons’ Cosmic American Music, Glen Campbell and Jimmy Webb’s Wichita Lineman and even Brian Wilson’s teenage symphonies are all recalled while there’s a nod to the more recent metaphysical musings of Sturgill Simpson. There’s even, if you dig into the lyrics, a concept of sorts, several characters appearing in several of the songs.

The album opens with a welter of sounds as if the band were tuning up like an orchestra before Unbroken Hearts hits its sweet country stride. Riding the range here like Waylon Jennings,  Lucas lays his cards on the table from the start singing, “I’ve been told to walk away nearly every time I make an album. I hear there’s no good men left, everyone in Nashville’s deaf, sad songs are a thing of the past.” Thankfully over the ten songs here he proves conclusively that those deaf guys are in the wrong. Unbroken Hearts itself proves the point, its muscular Jennings chug leavened by some gliding pedal steel and chiming guitar especially at the end of the song as they spiral away. Lucas digs into the muscle and sinews of country rock throughout the album. Ain’t We Free rips away like Doug Sahm rocking the Armadillo back in the seventies, the curling guitars going apeshit while The Flame is introduced with a tremendous thick stringed grungy guitar strum that propels the song into a cosmic honky tonk heaven with a stinging pedal steel solo that recalls the fuzz fuelled efforts of Buddy Cage and Sneaky Pete back in the days. Wrong Side Of The Dream ripples along like The Burritos backing Gram and Emmylou with Lydia Loveless trading lines with Lucas in fine fashion before Lucas dips into George Jones territory for the piano led tear stained heartache of Pray For Rain.

An album composed of the above would already be well worth listening to but Lucas and Kneiser up the ante with a brace of songs that, as we said above, positively shimmer. Next To You is at heart a country ballad but it’s dressed up in a sumptuous confection of guitar and pedal steel that is like a heat haze conjuring up Dave Crosby and Israel Nash’s psychedelic country visions. Call The Doctor is like Jackson Browne or the Eagles on speed, the band whipping up a frenzied beat like a Koyaanisqatsi fast motion version of California freeway driving as Lucas thrashes around envisioning his own death. Death and dying are writ large on the closing song, Midnight (the album was recorded as Lucas was recovering from a period of depression) and here he just excels. A return to the mix of Parsons’ cosmic aspirations and old fashioned country writing that opened the album, here Lucas sounds like Willie Nelson sleepwalking with Santos and Johnny over a fluorescent nightscape, Steve Daly’s pedal steel lighting the way. It’s impossible really to convey just how good this song is, you really need to hear it. Aside from the perfect delivery the lyrics are somewhat amazing as Lucas sings

Let the devil have his horns and heathen souls.
Midnight, I’m too young to feel this old.
Only two ways this can end,
I’ve got to die or find Jesus, don’t know which one is worse.
I might die cursed, at least it’s an end
And if I’m born again I’ll live with a hole where my heart should have been.

If you’re somewhat restless waiting for that next Sturgill Simpson album to drop then grab this, it will not only tide you over, it might even be better.

The album’s released on 19th February and Lucas is playing some UK dates to tie in with that. Dates here

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Brent Best. Your Dog, Champ. At The Helm Records/Last Chance Records

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There was an interesting buzz amongst some of the online Americana community when news of this album’s release was announced earlier this year. Naturally folk were keen to hear Brent Best again after a five year layoff, after all his band, Slobberbone were up there with the Drive By Truckers as an ass kicking roots rock outfit with author Stephen King name checking them as one of his favourites. In addition there was a degree of relief with the album having been crowd funded some years back with some folk fearing that the disc was destined to join the realms of fabled “lost” records. Truth was that Best was beset by a series of calamities that would have derailed anyone and by the time he was back on his feet he and his label, Last Chance Records, went out of their way to contact the original funders with Best penning an open letter explaining the five year wait and asking lost backers to contact him. Released a few months ago in the States Your Dog, Champ, it’s fair to say, more than repaid the wait with the reviews generous in their acclaim. The UK release is the first fruit of a promising collaboration between US label Last Chance and Brighton based At The Helm Records with some further delights promised.

First thing to say about the album is that it’s not the old rambunctious swagger of Slobberbone with Best admitting that when he started recording he “proceeded to furiously overdub the shit out of them (the songs), overcooking them within an inch of their life.” He’d been living with these songs for a while and it seems that only when he had got himself settled that he was able to fully realise his vision, re-recording the songs and then getting some simpatico players in to fine tune them. The end result is one of those albums which wears a patina of dust with some gnarly roots digging deep. A combination of dark ballads, acoustic based with pedal steel and fiddle accoutrements, and growling electric workouts all graced with Best’s grumbled vocals, it’s an album that impresses more and more on repeated listening, the lyrics repaying close attention as Best travels down a dark highway, the sort of album that fans of Neil Young have probably given up on ever hearing again from Shakey.
The album opens with the breezy soft country rock of Daddy Was A Liar, a deceptively upbeat song with a dark underbelly which opens with a bagful of kittens drowned and ends with an infant suffering the same fate. No such deception on the following Good Man Now with Best opening the song with the blunt, “Mama you always told me that the only good man was a dead man.” A grim tale of patricide with soaring pedal steel and screeching violin the song swings from slow ballad to ballsy rock in dramatic fashion. This howl of a violin is used again on the claustrophobic clutter of Tangled, the “heaviest song” here; crunching guitars over a rumbling bass line, splashing cymbals and a deep spiralling guitar solo make for a fine sonic soup with Best responding to himself on the chorus via overdubs sounding like REM on Quaaludes.

For the remainder Best adopts a sound not dissimilar to that of Uncle Tupelo, a dry alt-country manner driving the songs. His portraits of characters and situations on Aunt Ramona, Career Day and Robert Cole (songs he says that almost wrote themselves) are keen observations delivered in finest “No Depression” style although there is some tenderness in here as well such as on the mandolin and fiddle laced Queen Bee. He bares his soul on the weeping ballad Clotine, a love song of sorts (that could provide several months’ work for a psychoanalyst) it’s beautifully crafted and flows with a wonderful sense of regret and longing.

The album ends with the plaintive It Is You, another gem with Best’s words and gruff voice perfectly offset by his very fine players, the fiddle emotive, pedal steel gently caressing while his harmonica solo is a model of perfection. Throughout the album the musicians (including Ralph White of the Bad Livers on fiddle, Petra Kelly on violin, Andy Rodgers, Boxcar Bandits, on banjo, Scott Danborn from Centromatic on piano, Burton Lee pedal steel, Grady Don Sandlin drums, Drew Phelps bass and Claude Bernand from the Gourds on accordion) are on top form while Best handles acoustic and electric guitars with some aplomb. Altogether, Your Dog, Champ is perfectly positioned as a late contender for one of the best albums of the year and plans are afoot for Best to tour the UK early next year to promote the album.

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