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Nashville Pussy
Photo by Michael McClure |
NASHVILLE PUSSY
High As Hell (TVT)
During the
early months of 1998, when Nashville Pussy’s Let Them Eat Pussy
CD first rocked its evil way into my heart, I rang up the editor
at a guitar rag I used to write for and asked if I could do a
feature on ’em. After all, the band boasted a husband-and-wife
guitar team steeped in the glories of early AC/DC, and a six-foot-somethin’
tattooed chick who played bass and breathed fire with equal degrees
of enthusiasm. In other words, what’s not to love? “Oh, no,”
my esteemed editor tittered. “I mean, I would be embarrassed to
even say their name at our next editorial meeting!”
Two years on, Nashville Pussy is on just
about everybody’s lips, thanks to tours with Marilyn Manson and
Motorhead, and hundreds of incendiary one-nighters on their own;
these days, most editors I know speak their name with a combination
of awe and amusement. So what does this hard-touring, harder-living
band do for an encore? It’s called High As Hell, and it’s
pretty much Let Them Eat Pussy, Part II. Blaine Cartwright
stills howls things like “We’re gonna piss all over your town!”
while sounding like Bon Scott with a gullet full of Drano, Ruyter
Suys still has her Chuck Berry–via–Angus Young licks down pat,
and Corey Parks and Jeremy Thompson still do the backseat boogie
with the best of ’em.
And yet, sometimes the concept feels like
it’s wearing about as thin as one of Corey’s G-strings. “Piece
of Ass,” “Shoot First and Run like Hell” and “Blowjob From a Rattlesnake”
don’t offer much beyond good titles and hot riffs. “Go to Hell,”
a Skynyrdian ballad of revenge, finds Cartwright intoning the
lines “Last night I caught my wife/Fuckin’ two of my friends/Smile
on her face/A dick in each hand/Guilt running down her chin.”
After a killer verse like that, you think something really
freaky is gonna happen, right? Like maybe he’s gonna make his
buddies give him head at gunpoint, or maybe he’ll videotape the
scene and get rich selling copies to curious hillbillies. Alas,
he just blows them all away, then spends the rest of the song
running from The Man. Ronnie Van Zant might have liked it like
that, of course, but I’m hoping next time they’ll find a way to
burrow deeper into the swamp muck that spawned them.
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