As anyone who’s seen Honey Island Swamp Band lately can attest, they like to stretch things out. Last year at Jazz Fest they set a possible record by playing a mere 5 songs in a 50-minute set. But while jamming onstage is fine, when you hit the studio you’ve gotta have the songs. No problem on HISB’s fourth album, one that really underlines the diversity of their material.
The musical foundation hasn’t changed: They’ll still remind you of the Stones at times, the Band or the Radiators at others—and I also thought of the Drive-By Truckers, another proudly Southern band with two main songwriters, one (Patterson Hood in the Truckers, Chris Mule in HISB) who writes the more epic numbers and the other (Mike Cooley in DBT, Aaron Wilkinson in HISB) who’s got the sweeter touch and the drier wit. The comparisons end there though, because HISB sound here like a band able to take on whatever shape the material demands. When they draw from classic New Orleans R&B (on the opening “How Do You Feel”) they’re a hopped-up roadhouse band; on “No Easy Way” they take on an easy-rolling Caribbean feel. And “She Goes Crazy” introduces some drunk-sounding Dixieland horns that perfectly suit the lyric’s tale of an obsessive girlfriend and a guy who doesn’t mind a bit. Indeed, the lyrics here evince an eccentricity that seldom gets noticed, whether they’re sticking the line “She loves me like a rubber hose” into a romantic tune, or recalling (on “Ain’t No Fun”) a love affair that went bad as soon as the girlfriend’s brother kicked the singer in the head.
Producer Luther Dickinson gives this album a slightly different feel than the HISB’s previous three: There are fewer outright rockers, and a layered sound (with horns, keyboards and mandolin) with less emphasis on guitar. While the songs are shorter than they’d be live, he does allow some jamming space, with a slide/mandolin tradeoff on “Through Another Day” and a long, swampy intro that sets up “Devil’s Den.” If they want to stretch these tunes to 10 minutes onstage they’ll get no complaints from us.
