Honkytonk Homage with a Dry Lyrical Twist

There’s an old adage that inside every music journalist there’s a frustrated musician.  Unlike most of his peers in that most dubious of professions, Andrew Mueller, who left his native Australia in a futile search for fame and fortune as a music hack with Melody Maker, is frustrated no longer – he is vocalist, guitarist and principal songwriter in The Blazing Zoos, a band that, as he puts it, “plays both kinds of music, loudly”.  It’s more than a mere hobby or vanity project for Mueller, and, although their lyrics have a tendency towards deadpan humour – as does Mueller’s prose and, indeed, his lugubrious personality – they’ve earned some pretty serious props along the way, including support slots with The Drive-By Truckers and, more recently, Corb Lund. These are professionals who, you feel, would not gladly suffer a bunch of rank amateurs on the off-chance of a good review. And so their music deserves to be taken seriously and demands to be judged on that basis.

For their second album, The Blazing Zoos pay homage to some of Mueller’s musical heroes and influences, who range from Merle Haggard to Faron Young and the Truckers themselves, in a cheerfully referential and ramshackle fashion. Stylistically, their music has at least one cowboy boot planted in Texas honkytonk and you won’t hear any lachrymose ballads, for the simple reason that there aren’t any.  Mueller’s voice, marked by a notable Aussie twang, veers more towards the rasp of Shane MacGowan than the sweetness of George Jones, and his guitar playing is, let’s say, at the rudimentary end of the spectrum. But his support team (lead guitarist Jeremy Jones, bassist Lara Pattison and drummer Gen Matthews, aided by Neil Bob Herd on pedal steel and Paul Fitzgerald on banjo) are nothing if not proficient and, to be fair, virtuosity is not their aim. The Zoos are firmly in the tradition of good-time bands: the sort of outfit you might stumble across on a road trip in the American South, entertaining a room full of half-drunk ne’er-do-wells on a Friday night before passing a hat around to compensate them for their efforts.

I will hereby declare an interest: I am an acquaintance of Mueller, with whom I play cricket, and we share occasional car journeys to far-flung corners of the Home Counties while listening to Americana music, of which he is a fellow enthusiast, simultaneously discussing his erratic but occasionally fruitful bowling, and entirely imaginary prowess at batting.  As you would expect from a writer, wordplay is at a premium in his lyrics, which run the gamut from self-deprecating irony to… well, that’s about it, aside from an ill-advised excursion into the arcane world of Aussie Rules football (“Bob Chitty’s Blues”), a subject for which the listener’s enthusiasm will, I suspect, depend entirely on whether or not they are Australian, for no one else has the slightest interest in the game, as his groaning bandmates attest whenever they are called upon to play the tune.

The live favourite “It’s Your Own Time You’re Wasting”, a typically misanthropic anthem of self-loathing,  pretty much sets the tone: over a boisterous honkytonk rhythm sweetened by Herd’s plaintive pedal steel, Mueller’s rasping vocal informs us matter-of-factly: “If I wanted to be with someone who hates me I’d stay in on my own.” “I Can’t Lose (If I Don’t Play)”, a title in the tradition of  the recently-deceased Dan Hicks, celebrates a risk-averse approach to life and love (“I won’t get my heart broken tomorrow if I don’t fall in love today”), while “Still Up At Five” is both a homage and sequel to Faron Young’s “Four In The Morning” and “Roy Rogers Jr”, inspired by a trip to the hellish home for has-beens that is Branston, Missouri, mines a melodramatic seam of pathos in tribute to a man who can never surpass his vicarious reputation.  The generically titled “Country Drinking Song” does exactly what it says on the tin. “My neck’s not red and I don’t drive a truck,” sings Mueller, accurately. “If you’re looking for a cowboy you’re out of luck.”