Some Stupid With a Flare Gun is arresting, rootsy rock from a band that’s been around for more than a decade and may be just hitting its stride. The Ass Ponys have been making folk-rock, country-rock and just plain rock out of Cincinnati, Ohio, since 1988. This is the quartet’s fifth release, and it reveals a powerful and subtle band.
The Ponys write their own material, with lyrics and vocals from frontman Chuck Cleaver. He generally sings in a gut-wrenching falsetto-like tenor — think Neil Young on steroids. He specializes in hook-laden tunes and creepy vignettes of blue-collar characters scratching out an existence somewhere in the heartland.
You know this record has grabbed hold of you when you wake up on a cold winter morning humming bits of the infectious opening track, “Pretty as You Please.” Lines like “They found her hanging in the neighbor’s barn/Swinging in the breeze/Long-legged with her toes near touching/As pretty as you please.”
These aren’t so much story-songs as glimpses into desperate lives, like “The dirt farmer’s wife” in “Sidewinder,” who’s “hanging her laundry on the line/She’s wasting her life/but other than that she’s doing fine.” Wrap it up with soaring harmonies on the chorus, and you’ve got some very compelling music.
“Your Amazing Life” is a slow, piano-based bit of country soul rife with biblical and Americana imagery like “When the sinners turn to salt/and the tigers turn to butter.” “Swallow You Down” is a twangy, driving rocker with Sixties country-rock influences and some nifty internal rhyme schemes and another soaring chorus. “Magnus” draws on the Sir Douglas Quintet sound with organ and dobro. “Kitten,” a tale of a widow at her husband’s grave (or maybe a daughter at her father’s), starts out quietly acoustic with Cleaver nearly whispering the vocals, and ends as a devastating electric rocker.
The silly “X-tra Nipple” bears mention as the only song I know that uses the word borborygmy. The instrumental “Love Tractor” is a real bonus, though. The ability to create interesting songs without words sometimes seems a lost art, one being kept alive by roots-rock acts like Los Lobos, the Meat Puppets and now the Ass Ponys. “Love Tractor” draws inevitable comparisons to the Allman Brothers, with some Grateful Dead overtones.
Throughout this CD, Bill Alletzhauser contributes guitar, banjo and slide guitar playing that runs the gamut from subtle to bombastic as appropriate, and the whole band plays as a smooth, well-oiled unit. *Some Stupid With a Flare Gun* is a minor masterpiece of independent rock.
(Checkered Past, 1999)
