Southern Culture on the Skids – Dirt Track Date

At first blush, the presence of these ersatz white-trash exponents on a major label, even after a slew of indie releases, defies reason. Then you hear David Hartman’s cowbell clear as, well, a bell on “Voodoo Cadillac”, and Rick Miller’s chooglin’ guitar heads off toward Creedence Clearwater, and the air gets thick with B-52’s sass — and you’ve got to figure if the Black Crowes can sell a trunkload of records, these folks oughtta do all right.

And so the hip reinvention of the past continues. Not that that’s inherently a bad thing; Dirt Track Date, for example, is one hell of a brainless good time. Although I’m going to hate it when the frat boys start wearing seed caps and singing along to “White Trash”, and if DGC have any kind of marketing luck, that fate is mere months away.

This is not to argue, by the way, that because SCOTS have left behind modest recording budgets offered by the likes of Sympathy for the Record Industry they’ve somehow compromised, sold out, gone over to the dark side. No, these are good songs, and an ample recording budget simply gets the full twang out of the guitar and guarantees that you can hear the surprisingly fluid bass lines of Mary Huff. It doesn’t mean they’ve changed, only that you can hear everything.

Which leads to the only serious quibble to be had here. Mary Huff sings backup only on “Firefly” and lead only on the spectacular “Nitty Gritty”. It isn’t an accident that those are the two best tracks, but it’s a pity that’s all we hear from her. Just because she looks sharp in a bouffant wig doesn’t mean she’s an ornament, fellas.