ALBUM REVIEW: Athens’ Chickasaw Mudd Puppies Wriggle Back to Life for ‘Fall Line’

It sounds just like you’d expect from some good ol’ boys who named their band after a salamander. After a 30-year hiatus, the reunited and expanded version of Athens, Georgia’s Chickasaw Mudd Puppies pumps out bluesy, Southern rocky swamp metal.

Chickasaw Mudd Puppies (photo by Jason Thrasher)

In the early 1990s, founders Brant Slay (vocals, washboard, harmonica) and Ben Reynolds (vocals, percussion, electric guitar) whipped up a sound that leaned heavily on repurposed items, including cans and a washboard, as well as a homemade stompbox for guitar effects that impressed R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe enough that he produced two albums for the band, 1990’s White Dirt and 1991’s 8 Track Stomp, along with legendary bluesman Willie Dixon. But a major record label’s vision of future recorded success didn’t sit well with the duo, and they called it quits in 1992.

A call from the makers of the 2011 Jason Statham movie The Mechanic, who wanted to use “Ponky Knot,” a song from the band’s first album, inspired the duo to re-record it, and the process worked so well that the band reunited, adding drummer Alan “Lumpy” Cowart.

Fall Line is the restructured group’s latest release, and like its namesake it’s a slippery bugger to hold on to. The offerings come off like the Legendary Shack Shakers sitting in with Primus for a backwoods howlathon.

Slay’s lyrics are a skull-busting mix of the stuff of nightmares and backwoods homilies. “Birdsville” introduces some unlikely elbow rubbing: Slim Harpo and Charlie Musselwhite with William Faulkner tagging along to jot down some advice on road-kill cuisine: “You don’t eat a buzzard; you don’t eat a crow, birds that go to hopping just might have a soul.”

Slay throws in some salamander-speak on “Hands,” with a mudpuppy screaming at the top of his lungs about the destruction humans are unleashing on the climate: “Chomping on the ozone and having your fun / Going to burn up bone drought dry …. It ain’t no optical illusion / so draw your own conclusion / that our icy world endings are melting too / Living in a greenhouse, where Burger King is King now / Picture all the children eating Soylent Green.”

“Smokestack Monkey” has Slay blowing harp like he’s trying to expel a lung or two and Reynolds  pulling strings like he’s trying to rip ’em off the neck and strangle anybody who wanders too close while Cowart punches out the backbeat.

The pups host a swampy, shimmery heat fest that’ll boil the brains of unsuspecting or improperly hydrated voyagers — drink up before you dive in.

The Chickasaw Mudd Puppies’ Fall Line is out April 7 on Strolling Bones Records.