For pretty much the entirety of its two decades together, Southern Culture On The Skids has positioned itself as shameless champions of everything white trash. How bizarre, then, to discover that the veteran three-piece actually has impeccable taste. Singer-guitarist Rick Miller, flame-haired bassist Mary Huff, and drummer Dave Hartman may subsist on cold fried chicken, warm Schlitz, and instant coffee, but damned if they don’t sound impossibly classy on Countrypolitan Favorites.
Having evidently run out of new ways to sing about dirt-track dates and cheap motels, SCOTS goes the covers route this time out. Forgetting kitsch — sorry, there’s no trailer-park version of “Running Bear” here — the band concentrates on songs from country’s golden past. Wasting no time getting to the good stuff, they rocket off the line with a rockabilly revamping of Don Gibson’s ’50s classic “Oh Lonesome Me”. From there, Miller and company display an ambition that will shock and awe even their most hardcore disciples. T. Rex’s glamtastic “Life’s A Gas” gets reborn as psychedelicized MOR, the Who’s “Happy Jack” is transformed into a banjo-powered hoedown, and “Tobacco Road” ends up funkier than John Loudermilk would have ever dared dream.
Elsewhere, the Kinks’ “Muswell Hillbilly” plays out, transcendentally, like Sunday services at the Grand Ole Opry, and Huff sounds like the long-lost love child of Brenda Lee on the retro revelation “Funnel Of Love”. It all adds up to one of the most unexpectedly killer albums of the year. You don’t even have to live in a rusted-out Airstream to love this late-career triumph.
