Artist: Dollar Store
Album: Money Music
Label: Bloodshot Records
Year: 2007
Reviewed by: Woodstock Slim
This is me leaping off buildings and taking chances saying stuff like, "If Led Zeppelin were still together, they would have sounded like this album!" Money music," I mean. The one thing you can say for sure is that all the musicians on "Money Music" work very well together and there is a great energy you can feel from the first ripping track to the last bleepy twang. It was recorded in two days and that is alright by me. Don't ever see the point of 43 days in the studio. What are doing in there? You only have to record like 45 minutes!
Waco Brother Alan Doughty's manic bass are anchored by Joe Camirillo (Hushdrops) hitting the drums with straight forward authority with front man Deano Schlabowske with Tex Schmidt from that Rockabilly outfit The Roughnecks, firing his guitar like a six shooter from the hip every damned chance he gets. Sometime he shoots with a rifle adding space and depth here and there but for the most his just shooting everything in site to bleeding bits.
On "Company Town" the back beat slaps up and grows into a punk frenzy circle jerking as they lament about hatred for the whole wide world becoming a Company Town. Ghost Guitars painted on a canvas with a thin brush dipped in blue ink you last heard on Texas Flood when Stevie was still around. The track breaks down into a Black Sabbathy Geezer Butler rolling bass guitar monologue with guitars squealing and mourning until it just dies... (they should consider releasing a 22 minute version of that like the immortal 'Inagada da vida')
On "Reserve the right" it breaks down completely in a blues duck walk kind of twangy track. Don't know where they pulled that out from but it rrrips and delivers the passionate line, "Ten percent of my soul tonight" like a stale birthday cake! I grabbed my air guitar right there and played hard without even a tune in. Man! It's Rock and it's Country and sometimes it sends you both. Country that belts like Rock is more what you've got here. Kapow! The tracks are hard and dirty and "greasy" someone said. It is not beautiful like (Smog) or dark like Johnny Dowd or sensitive like Micha P. Hinson. Dollar Store is Zombie-meat and ghost-guitars and axe-blades and cigarette smoke and beer bottles under the seats of your '74 Volvo. Dollar Store made their own acre of Country and Rock.
