Artist: Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band
Album: Dance Songs for Hard Times
Label: Thirty Tigers
Release Date: 4.9.21
Money’s tight for the mighty Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band on Dance Songs for Hard Times, the lively new album of galvanizing electric blues from the burly, fingerstyle guitar dynamo and friends. Informed by family health scares, pandemic depression and COVID-related financial calamity, the red-hot trio’s energetic romp sympathizes with the impoverished and the destitute, as the strutting, dogged insistence of the contagious haymaker “Ways and Means” dreams big but laments not having a penny to its name, while the gritty, back-alley ballad “Dirty Hustlin’” accepts the cold reality of going back to earning cash by any means necessary. The wolves are at the door with eviction notices in their mouths.
Stuffed into jeans or overalls and tight tank tops, flanked by his washboard playing wife Breezy and propulsive drummer Sad Max Senteney, Peyton refuses to sit around waiting for the repo man to arrive. With his precious 1954 Supro Dual Tone electric guitar in his hands, instead of a shotgun, Peyton gleefully plugs in and lets the wrangled riffs fly, eyes rolling back in his head while firing up the call-and-response, psychobilly free-for-all “Rattle Can” and the pounding, ridiculously infectious “I’ll Pick You Up.” Raising his arms to heaven, seeking absolution from terrible trials and tribulations, Peyton pleads for divine intervention during the wild gospel frenzy “Come Down Angels,” its exuberant handclaps and greased-up slide guitar caught up in a struggle of faith, devotion, and desperation. Its prayers may or may not be answered.
Producer Vance Powell, a four-time Grammy winner who lifted Chris Stapleton and Jack White to new heights, believes in Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band, encouraging Peyton’s use of vintage gear and stoking their life-affirming euphoria, needed now more than ever. Vivid and potent, digging deep into some of the nastiest, most unstoppable grooves the country-blues genre has ever seen, Dance Songs for Hard Times goes from the spirited, 1950s rockabilly swing of an upbeat “Too Cool to Dance” to the growling grind of “Sad Songs” and the rough-and-tumble “Crime to Be Poor” without skipping a beat. Vocally, Peyton is in fine form, boldly and audaciously belting out relevant lyrics with raw strength and unbridled enthusiasm over a louder, more amplified version of the threesome’s familiar sound, which burns a little brighter this time around.
—Peter Lindblad
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