Given the name of the band and the title of the album, you might be forgiven for wondering what the hell is going on. The former sounds like some traditional, honky tonk show band, the latter a hangover from the hippie dream. Well, all of that is true and more.
For me, this fun and fantastic album captures what I should imagine it must have been like when the Outlaw Country singers of the early seventies, such as Kris Kristofferson, Willie Nelson, and Waylon Jennings, brought their cosmic country sound to the more traditional country fans of Austin and the south. When boogie met head trip. When the rules were broken and then rewritten. Or put more simply, this album is both a sideways look and a sonic love letter to the genre.
The title track kicks off and sets the tone, kick ass country-rock laced through with strange and squalling sounds, although nothing too odd or out there yet, but by the time you get to “Across the Milky Way,” a wonderful waltz laced with cosmic (literally) vibes and surreal lyrics, you realize that this isn’t your normal country band.
If, as I suggested, this album ebbs and flows between the country-fied and southern fried and the cosmic, then “Changing of the Guard” is deep in the latter territory, a ’70s-infused psychedelic rock trip for the modern age. “My Doppleganger” is a strange blend of music-hall bop and New Orleans mutant-marching-band jazz. And “Star Child” could easily have been found on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
If you feel that country music is a bit set in its ways, perhaps guilty of going over the same themes and tropes, using the same old template, if you are tired of hearing about mystic cowboy figures, dogs, pickup trucks, and the one that got away, bored with songs with whiskey, highway and lonesome in the title…The Sensational Country Blues Wonders!, in general, and this album in particular, has everything you need. It’s outta this world!
Tune in, turn on, drop out and boogie like a badass!
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