Some songs can frighten you from the first line. “He’s got a bat and a gun in the truck and a whole lot of whiskey,” Randy McAllister yowls on “Baseball Bat”, from his third CD, Double Rectified Bust Head. It’s fitting, though, since Randy is an uber-Texan whose songs come screaming out of the wasteland, badly drunk and looking for trouble.

McAllister is a Lone Star anomaly, a harp ace in the Land of Guitar, but that doesn’t bother him much—his band just sets their instruments on “Kill” and peel out of the garage. No Stevie Ray wannabes, no slow songs for the ladies, not even much showoff harp; just, as his last album title warned, “Grease, Grit, Dirt And Spit,” and lots of it. Possessed with a fine harp, a keen wit, a unique strangled gospelish wail, and no pretensions, Randy and his ace backups get busy writing a Bible of hardheaded wisdom. For example: “It Ain’t Like The Movies” (“when the fighting breaks out”), “Who’s The Parent, Who’s The Child” (“She takes care of the family while their parents get high”), and the hilarious bounced-check story of “$127.00 Sandwich,” which will ring true for anyone who shudders at the letters NSF. Even when he mellows out a bit, as he does on the ace Stax-inflected “Blues Colored Soul” or “Nasty Little Day Dreams,” his hard wit will still mow you down; the last song is about all the ways in which he’d like to find his ex-girlfriend dead. God bless Texas.