During the summer and early fall of 2009, the folks at Bloodshot Records, Chicago’s “insurgent country” label, put on a series of concerts featuring a rotating cast of a bunch of the musicians currently or formerly on their roster. In the spring of 2011, Bloodshot releases a compilation album recorded at the Chicago show on that tour, which took place at the annual block party thrown by The Hideout, a club that often hosts these and musicians of a similar bent.
It sounds like it was quite the party, and it’s good to know up front that “no one got hurt” in the making of this record. It was obviously a gathering of talent on a celestial scale.
The album’s release was timed to coincide with 2011’s version of Record Store Day,[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Record_Store_Day] a national whoop-ti-do that started out in 2008 as a way of encouraging music consumers to patronize their local record stores.
The musicians probably most closely associated with Bloodshot are the members of The Mekons, the punk band originally based in Leeds turned country-folk-rockers based in Chicago. After an acoustic opening track from the oldtime/jug band the Sanctified Grumblers, Mekons members Sally Timms, John Langford and Rico Bell play a couple of numbers, The Handsome Family’s “Sad Milkman” with Sally in the lead and “Pill Sailor” with Jon singing lead. And the Mekons offshoot Waco Brothers bring their cowpunk to close out the album with three rockers, “Red Brick Wall,” the raucous “See Willy Fly By” and a punk-tinged polka with Bell singing lead and leading on accordion, “Merseysong.”
Those songs alone would probably make this a record worth having. But the roster includes Alejandro Escovedo with a couple of his best-known songs (“Castanets” and “I Was Drunk”), the mercurial Bobby Bare Jr. (“The Monk at the Disco” and “Valentine”), a rare reunion of The Blacks playing “Theresa Leaves Lonesome Town” and “Horrorshow,” twangy singer-songwriter Scott H. Biram (“Still Drunk, Still Crazy, Still Blue” and the manic “Truck Driver”), the soulful strut of the Deadstring Brothers, the hardcore country punk of The Scotland Yard Gospel Choir, and a paltry single track from the genre-bending band Moonshine Willy.
Some of my online acquaintances attended this show in 2009, and from the evidence of this disc, I wish I’d been there. You will too if you’re one of the lucky ones to pick up this record on Record Store Day. It’s 19 tracks of fine hardcore rootsy goodness. If you’re curious about any of these artists, check out the links on Bloodshot’s website.
(Bloodshot, 2011)
