Nashville Pussy
Say Something Nasty (Artemis)
by Scott Hefflon
The great white (trash) hope, returns with their best yet. This is what I always hoped for in a Nashville Pussy record! Filled end-to-end with AC/DC riffs and ZZ Top boogie, Nashville Pussy has the good sense to add female group yells into the mix, the kinda stuff that gets the loins thrusting as the head bobs, the feet do that white boy dance thing nailed so well in the cafe scene in Natural Born Killers (just before Mallory ices the lewd fucker for wagging his tongue at her. Word of warning: Hit on cute fillies carefully when they’re armed and psychotic), and when yer not pounding a shot or the countertop, yer playing air guitar, scratching your thigh and making guitar faces.
The slow songs kinda tank cuz while Blaine’s got a helluva gravelly voice, it just doesn’t hold up when the adrenaline ain’t coursing hard’n’fast. The “opener” (after the spoken intro) starts off in typical trash rock fashion. The Southern-fried snarl and vibe saves an otherwise, uh, blues rock glammer that any number of poser fucks from the real late ’80s coulda cranked out. Junkyard comes to mind (I think they wrote the line “bar room brawls and bathroom stalls/from New Orleans to Maine” which always stuck with me as I drank and fucked my way up the Eastern seaboard in my younger daze), but lots of names’d come to mind if I was, uh, sober.
Two songs alone make this sucker a keeper. Plenty of others sound real good loud with the car windows open and a cigarette hanging out of your mouth, eyeing the young girls who probably listen to rap or whatever in belly shirts and hip-huggers, but this sucker’s all about two songs to me: “Gonna Hitchhike Down to Cincinnati and Kick the Shit Out of Your Drunk Daddy” and “You Give Drugs a Bad Name.” Great titles, both, and great songs to boot. The first is quick, with tasty little guitar licks opposite the vocals, and the vocals start off using that low, speak/singing style that Rob Zombie uses sometimes, though I’d rather liken it to Zodiac Mindwarp (who ruled for vocals and sleaze content and stripper-dancability, but suffered from Def Leppard-processed guitar production and damn-near drum machine sterilization on the skin beating). “You Give Drugs a Bad Name” is a great shuffle, like ZZ Top’s “Tush,” and the point of the song are those annoying amateurs who pass out on bathroom floors at parties. Lifers like Nashville Pussy know how to throw ’em back, but they know how to keep ’em down and pace themselves so, while they may sway and stagger a whole lot by the end of the night, they stay on their feet and rock your dumb ass into next week.
Oh, and there’s a pretty kickin’ cover of “Rock N Roll Hoochie Coo,” a classic rock standard by Johnny Winters and Rick Derringer. I used to listen to this song on WAAF on Saturday mornings in my boxers when my dad dragged my hungover ass outta bed to wash the mud off the family car from going to yet another palette bonfire out in the woods in the middle of fuckin’ Nowheresville, USA.
(130 5th Ave. New York, NY 10011)
