The Meat Purveyors save their choicest cut, “Car Crash”, for the end of Pain By Numbers, and the song is a genuine killer. Three minutes of frenetic acoustic guitar and flying-sparks mandolin, the track finds singer Jo Stanli Cohen convinced she’s doomed to flame out behind the wheel.
Sure enough, she ends up in a pile of twisted metal, listening for the ambulance as a crowd stands and stares. There’s genuine panic in Cohen’s voice when, after realizing she can smell her blood mixing with gasoline, she half-sings, half-screams “I can see my body from above.” Amaxophobics, consider yourselves forewarned.
The Austin quartet keeps things considerably lighter on the rest of Pain By Numbers, which is a half-and-half mixture of originals and covers. The Purveyors-penned material is pretty much unassailable, starting with the opening don’t-do-heroin rave-up “TMP Smackdown”. The full-throttle bluegrass keeper “Heartbreaker” finds Cohen endlessly amused by the fact she can’t help her cheating ways. And professional barflies will be unable to resist “How Can I Be So Thirsty Today?” (the punchline of which is, “When I had so much to drink last night”).
The Meat Purveyors aren’t at their strongest on the covers. Although their rendition of Bill Monroe’s “One I Love Is Gone” would bring a tear to the eye of Ralph Stanley, Rank & File’s early ’80s nugget “Amanda Ruth” comes off curiously flat. And, appropriately enough, Dusty Springfield’s “In The Middle Of Nowhere” doesn’t really go anywhere. Still, give the Purveyors credit for having cool record collections; who else would dare to cover ’70s icons Fleetwood Mac, honky-tonk hell-raiser Johnny Paycheck and anti-pop misanthrope Boyd Rice, all on the same album?
“Car Crash” aside, the Meat Purveyors are at their finest here on “Leaving”, a gorgeously mournful ballad about a relationship that’s gone too far south to ever come back. “I packed up everything you ever gave me/I left it in a box in your garage,” Cohen sings over incandescent mandolin and slow-burn fiddle. Ouch! That’s the kind of revelation that can convince a person to end it all. Behind the wheel of a car, of course.
