Artist: Buck Satan & the 666 Shooters
Title: Bikers Welcome! Ladies Drink Free
Type: Album
Label: Thirteenth Planet
With a band name as unusual and specific as this, it’s strange to discover that there are 2 separate bands called Buck Satan & the 666 Shooters. You’ll be pleased to hear then, (I would hope), that this review does not relate to the dodgy pub band from the North East of England, and instead relates to Grandpa Al Jourgensen’s latest musical side project. Anyone familiar with Al will know that there is a wide and varied range of bands that he has worked on apart from Ministry, including Revolting Cocks, Lard, (with the Dead Kennedy’s Jello Biafra), and smaller projects such as 1000 Homo DJ’s, a project that was made up of Al’s usual co-conspirators, but is probably best known for the collaboration with Trent Reznor on a cover of Black Sabbath’s Supernaut. Now the reason I bring up 1000 Homo DJ’s is that Al recorded under the name of Buck Satan at the time. Now Buck gets his own release in the form of a project that Al has been wanting to record for the past thirty years. Yes, it’s a Country & Western album, and for the most part it’s a pretty straight up Country & Western album, but there’s a lot to like here, so pop on your cowboy hat, break out the steel guitar and a bottle of whiskey and sit back and wrap your ears around this.
We know who Buck Satan is, but what about the 666 Shooters? Well, that would be Mike Scaccia from Rigor Mortis and Rick Nielsen from Cheap Trick on guitars and Tony Campos of Static X and Soulfly on bass duties. When you consider these guys churning out Country and Western music, the picture doesn’t really fit, but then you hear a song like ‘Quicker than Liquor’, and the pieces just fall into place. The aforementioned track is pure Country and Western, with an undertone of industrial running through the roots of the music, most notably in the programmed drums, however the song subject, extolling the virtues of hard drugs as a quicker means of suicide than drinking, is pure Al and delivered with a classic country drawl and with tongue slightly in cheek. Whilst the humour never reaches the level (or crassness) of Ginger’s country project, Mr Howling Willie C**t, there are laughs to be had along the way here, like on ‘I Hate Every Bone In Your Body Except Mine’, the tale of a man trying to strike a balance between his dislike of a woman and his love of kinky sex, and ‘Cheap Wine, Cheap Ramen’, about being screwed over by record labels. It’s not all about the humour though, the musicianship on display here is quite brilliant in places, and it’s very easy to get swept up in it all and find yourself foot tappin’ and a’thigh slappin’ along with the music, in particular on the hugely catchy ‘Quicker Than Liquor’, and ‘What’s Wrong With Me”, which reminds me of an upbeat country reworking of Ministry’s own ‘The Fall’.
It took a major health scare last year, (in which he had a 100% blood transfusion), to make Al decide to finally go ahead with this project, and I can only assume that whoever’s blood he got was Country through and through, because this sounds like the most natural thing in the world now, like he’s been doing this for years. I expect a lot of people will dismiss this as ‘not metullz’, or quite simply just not their thing, and that’s fair enough I guess, it’s really not for everyone. Those with an open mind who do bother to check this out and give it a try though are going to be pleasantly surprised, because firstly it’s catchy as hell, (seriously, I’ve had quite a few of these stuck in my head the past few weeks), it’s funny and at times rather poignant. It’s music to dump the wife and shoot the dog to, so pick up that bottle of whiskey and give me a ‘Yeee Haww’, then sit back and enjoy the most unlikely hit of the year.
http://www.thirteenthplanet.com
Lee Kimber
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