Artist:     Whiskey Myers

Album:     Whiskey Myers

Label:     Snakefarm Records

Release Date:     9.30.2019

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Whiskey Myers is the fifth release from an eponymous six-piece, rock-blues band that positively boils with hard-nosed, in-your-face, hard-edged rock music. This ain’t an album for the faint-hearted. Nor is it a release that will keep all country, soul, rock or blues fans happy and content despite the, at times, clear genre crossover aspects on display. This is more about loud, raucous, get up and bop-a-long musical mastery.

This outfit offers a sound that can draw on Southern rock and undercurrents and hints of early Allman Brothers, a band that presumably influences Whiskey Myers in many ways. Other influences seem to stretch from the Stones and Nirvana to late country giant Waylon Jennings, ever a wildman of Nashville country music. There’s some excellent fire and fury in the fretwork while there’s an added bonus of Memphis horns too, giving the project a taste of unexpected Southern tradition and roots.

The band themselves say they work as a sort of “organic”way, with an evident ability to work their butts off with an increasingly popular presence on the road and in the studio. The band’s Texas roots are often clear here, with a scrabbling, self-assurance that slips out on pretty much every track while the band creates a riotous, rollercoaster wall-of-sound that keeps the heat high and rattles the windows and walls.

If there’s a criticism with this one, it may well be the simple point that there’s a tendency to sound just too samey track on track, with too much pedal-to-the metal stuff bubbling throughout. Many, of course, love that wild, breathless, raw edge that full-on rock’n’ roll can often deliver. For those of that shape and shade, Whiskey Myers—the band and the album—is likely to be a winner.

—Iain Patience