Russ Still and The Moonshiners Return With Their Fourth Studio Album

The fourth release from Southern/country rock six piece Russ Still and the Moonshiners, Still Cookin’, shows how a band’s inner fire can be stoked and fanned to greater heights with each new outing. Russ Still’s front man duties and songwriting skills are a potent and powerful ingredient in the mix making this outfit so successful, but Still has surrounded himself with an outstanding crew of first class collaborators who add much to the music’s stylistic blend. Eight out of nine of the songs on this full length release are written by Still alone; only “Juanita” alone shares a co-writing credit with Jonita Dimmock. The collection is cut from a distinctive musical cloth, but it never means the performances come off as overtly imitative or otherwise stilted. Russ Still and the Moonshiners write and deliver music full of the fury of our all too human lives.

There’s an obvious country slant to songs like the opener “Promised Land”, but it’s not an imaginative stretch to hear how much more compositions like this owe to blues and blues rock. The arrangement has a slow simmer paying off with rousing choruses and ideally restrained lead guitar punctuates the spaces with condensed, stinging passages. The second song “Long Way From Home” begins with some unadorned acoustic guitar sparkling through the mix before the band falls in behind its playing. Russ Still and the Moonshiners exhibit a real penchant for building credible atmospherics and keeping an entertaining presentation up throughout. The lyrics revisit some arch familiar themes, but Russ Still’s writing repackages these well worn sentiments in an uniquely individual way. There’s some unexpected wah-wah guitar licks bubbling up along the sides of “Glorrine’s” and a generally more intense mood bearing down on the audience than the preceding song. It never undercuts the entertainment value of the material – Russ Still and his band mates  is capable of bringing any piece of music to a white hot burn or steady simmer.

The commercially minded country ballad has taken a much deserved critical drubbing over the last decade and more, but Still and the Moonshiners show a flair for this artistically moribund style on “I Can’t” few, if any, of their contemporaries can hope to match. Still sings with great sensitivity throughout and gives his performance just the right amount of energy to fall in sympathy with the backing. The rabble rousing shuffle of ”Juanita” has such an effortless rush it comes off as surprisingly anthemic – an ideal live tune begging for audience participation. The  other ballad on Still Cookin’, “10,000 Ways”, keeps a consistently muted approach over its five minutes and change running time, but the band can’t resist tossing in an appropriately climatic guitar solo and hard hitting drums near the song’s end. Still Cookin’ finds this world class unit working at or near the summit of their skills and sinewy grit accompanies the genuine intelligence steering the construction of this collection. There is scarcely anyone working within their particular genre quite as good.