Scott H. Biram - Graveyard Shift - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

BAD INGREDIENTS, Birams fourth full-length for Bloodshot Records, maintains the blues-metal-country-punk rock but strengthens it with crack guitar playing and shrewdly crafted songwriting.

Turkish pianist and composer, Fazil Say, is joined by his long-standing friend, the violinist Friedemann Eichhorn, in an album of mid-19th-century German repertoire. Includes the world premiere recording of Say's transcriptions of the Prelude and Liebestod from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, alongside the F-A-E Sonata of Dietrich, Schumann and Brahms, and Schumann's Violin Sonata No. 1. Say's complete violin works, also with Eichhorn, is available on 8.574085.

It's been said that rock and roll came from the blues on the right hand and country on the left; Scott H. Biram is the middle finger on both Austin TX's dirty old one-man band's third album for Bloodshot is profane and tender, alluring and frightening, and while such intensely polarizing forces would tear a lesser man apart, Scott appears to revel in the tug of war. With his '59 Gibson, mouth harp and electrified stomp board, hismuddied water gospel is sly enough to charm the devil, and the hip shake boogie irresistible enough to get the Man upstairs to come down and share a bottle of the brown with him. Scott can just as easily throw down some feral amped-up Delta blues as a stone cold country weeper that'll get the girls all dewy-eyed with faith and desire as a heavy metal field holler.