Hank Williams Jr. – Almeria Club

Hank Williams Jr.’s artistic collapse is among country music’s most embarrassing stories, not least of all for its excruciating duration. More than twenty years have passed since Whiskey Bent And Hell Bound, the last of his remarkable 1970s recordings that fused honky-tonk, blues, Southern rock, and singer-songwriter influences into a genuinely original signature.

It’s as hard to underestimate the greatness of records such as Hank Jr. & Friends as it is to reconcile the betrayed promise. Since those days, Bocephus has at best recorded forgettable country boogie; at worst, he has made a mockery of his own talents.

Named after and recorded in an Alabama juke joint where, supposedly, Jr.’s father and mother once barely escaped the gunshots of a jealous lover, Almeria Club is, at times, a welcome wayside on a prolonged decline. The blues influence returns with a vengeance: there’s the tough thump of opener “Last Pork Chop”, a greasy homage to Maxine’s BBQ in Kansas City, later reprised with stripped-down resonator slide and harmonica; the newgrassy “Outdoor Lovin’ Man”; and the grand gospel treatment of the somewhat maudlin “Cross On The Highway”.

But the loose, sweaty, live sound captured in the Almeria Club can’t save clumsy, tossed-off material. With the exception of “Cheatin’ Hotel” and the street-corner, finger-styled “Tee Tot Song”, rare efforts at aiming higher than larks, the set suggests Hank Jr., by choice or failure of will, can barely pen a song that doesn’t complete the phrase “You Know You’re A Redneck If…”

Worst of all, he includes “America Will Survive”, a patriotic retread of “A Country Boy Will Survive” and a gratuitous attempt to whoop the Monday Night Football masses into a warmongering frenzy. Bocephus has missed what might have been a genuine opportunity at renewed relevance.