Chickasaw Mudd Puppies
Fall Line
(Strolling Bones)
4 out of 5 stars
Videos by American Songwriter
When you push play on a track and hear the words Heads in red, skull to skull, boot-strap tendon snap, smell of dried blood. I’ve got a dead tree rotting inside my backyard. From his wooden arms are perching Satan’s guard, spit out over a tougher than month-old raw meat Bo Diddley beat, you know you have entered Chickasaw Mudd Puppies country.
Or maybe not.
The sweaty, stripped-down, Athens, Georgia-based swamp rock duo (now a trio) released only two albums in the early ’90s before disbanding. Known, if they were known at all, due to the involvement of R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe, who produced both recordings (the second with help from blues icon Willie Dixon), their primeval—or just evil—stomp was like little else on college or alternative radio. Gruffer and less commercially appealing than their similarly styled contemporaries The Flat Duo Jets, a crooked line can be drawn from the Puppies to the Legendary Shack Shakers, Southern Culture on the Skids, North Mississippi Allstars, and even The Black Keys.
As you have likely guessed, they return to unleash their high-octane, red clay-stained punk country/blues on a market that has changed substantially since we last heard their mosquito-infested, greasy Southern slime-rawk over three decades ago. They haven’t lost an ounce of their raucous energy in the intervening years.
Singer/harpist Brant Slay (also credited with washboard and stomp board), and drummer Alan “Lumpy Weed” Cowart (how’s that for a Boondocks nickname?) are joined by Ben Reynolds whose guitar/bass/keyboards fatten the sound without smoothing it out. Slay still sounds like he’s infused with demonic qualities in both his gritty, keening vocals and especially distorted harmonica, the latter influenced by the darker side of Little Walter.
Strap in for lots of blockbusting bursts of jet fuel in tracks like the crunching “Hands,” a treatise on the dangers of climate change (Chop, chop all the trees down never breathing much rain), the icky thump of “Birdsville” (name-checking blues harp masters Slim Harpo and Charlie Musselwhite) and “Florida” which explodes in a flurry of tom-tom sparks, overdriven mouth harp and shards of guitar in less than two breathless minutes.
Elsewhere, “Prison” slows the tempo to a slithering crawl as Slay sings/moans I’ve been down so long, got me singing my song, hear me moan. Counting them damn ole days until they let me go home. And they even go with a ballad, letting us catch our breath for a rare moment with the slightly more reserved “Scale.”
Why mess with a good thing? The Chickasaw Mudd Puppies circa 2023 pick up where they left us in 1991. And we wouldn’t want them any other way.
Courtesy Propeller PR
