Nothing quite compares to the six drunkard Waco Brothers squeezing onto that plank-of-a-stage at the annual Yard Dog party at SXSW and whipping up a bloody-good, supercharged country fury. Undoubtedly, it is an annual highlight, but is poses a Waco-specific problem: Without the live electricity, the boozy antics, the booze, and even Beatle Bob undulating unnaturally in the front row, Waco albums are not nearly the glorious hybrid that the much-bandied Cash-meets-Clash description suggests. Instead, they’re more like a can of cheap-ass American beer as sipped by a professional pint puller.
WacoWorld, the Chicago band’s unimaginatively-titled fourth studio effort, does not eliminate this nagging problem. It’s still inevitable to imagine how even the collection’s most raucous songs — the swing-minded “Red Brick Wall” and the surfabilly-licked “Good For Me” — will sound onstage. But WacoWorld does lessen the craving, mainly by being the band’s most far-reaching effort to date. Not just because of the pronouncement of horns, keyboards and, in the case of the paranoid R&B moment “The Hand That Throws The Bottle Down”, icy-cool harmonies (courtesy Kelly Hogan), but because the sextet sounds like they really, really tried.
Throughout, Jon Langford and gang are both rock-steady and spirited — bassist Alan Doughty, for one, delivers some insanely cool bass lines — and the production is just grown-up enough to sound, well, grown-up. But ultimately, this is Deano Schlabowske’s album. His heavy, blue-collar vocal presence is a delight, especially on the soon-to-be-abducted-by-aliens weeper “Hello To Everybody” and the outlawish “Red Brick Wall”. The latter features the brilliant salvo, “On the day of his death I built JFK a shrine/I know just how he felt/I get murdered in Texas every time.” A perfect line, whether drunk at a shindig in the Lone Star State or in your own living room.
