Southern Culture On The Skids – Mojo Box

Creative growth is a wonderful thing for an artist and blah de blah, but there’s a reason great grandmother’s crab cake recipe gets handed down each generation. There are just some things a body ought to be able to count on. After seven records, we know what to expect from Southern Culture On The Skids, and thank goodness.

Like a kinder, gentler Nashville Pussy, or the Cramps with family values, Mojo Box slathers us up with guitar riffs as lumpy as a camel, rough as a jackhammer or smooth and bright as Tennessee sippin’ whiskey, all slung loose and loud over salacious beats, and wrapped around songs that don’t require a graduate degree in literature: They’re entirely about cars and luuuuvvv — the things that matter.

If the band’s point of view ever needed to be validated, perhaps that happened with the Drive-by-Truckers’ breakthrough Southern Rock Opera, an unabashed assertion of the particularity of a uniquely southern working-class experience that won more attention than the SCOTS have achieved in almost twenty years of performing. But SCOTS has always had fun with the concept, and perhaps faux-PC critics have taken umbrage on behalf of rednecks and hillbillies everywhere. Get off your high horse and go visit a dirt track, y’all!

In the era of globalization, with Krispy Kremes and Waffle Houses becoming as prevalent nationwide as Starbucks, it’s as comforting as grandmother’s crab cake recipe to know that regional culture still counts for something, even if it is on the skids.