“California Dreamin'”? Nightmare is more like it. To hear this impassioned, longtime Los Angeles roots quartet tell it, the land of milk and honey is now homogenized milk and sour honey, a bleak, rocky landscape populated by former Red Staters who don’t realize they’re prisoners in a self-deluding hell of their own making.
In eleven originals — recorded, appropriately, in a basement, a cabin and a garage — the Hickmen rip the region with punishing minor-chord rave-ups with lyrics such as, “There ain’t no redneck trash like San Bernardino Country trash/They’re first in two-toothed, inbred, hate-filled societal outcasts,” from “San Bernardino County Blues”.
Oh, but the hit here is “Costco Socks”. In five tight verses and a chorus that ends, “One world, one store!”, the Hickmen don’t as much predict a society in which everyone — the rich and the poor — lives and dies in the titular footwear as they inform us we’re already living in it. It would be funnier if the irony didn’t slice so close to the bone, but that’s the point.
Michael Finn sings with a parched voice, as if he’s just come in out of the sun after singing to Fred Eaglesmith on his iPod. Multi-instrumentalist Michael C. Jones, bassist Tim Allyn and drummer Alan Waddington play like a pissed-off Band. As it would happen, the lead guitar on three tracks is played by the inspiration for the band’s name — Cracker’s Johnny Hickman.