Reverend Horton Heat
Spend A Night In The Box

The reverend has a twisted psyche and a straight face. He also only displays two expressions: with the guitar and without it. In the name of the Father, he loved rock 'n' roll as himself. In the name of the children, he built its simulacrum for the new millennium. In the name of the Holy Spirit, honestly, I'm not sure what he might have done, but I believe very little. Indeed, I believe very little. But I have faith in those who tell me that until you observe satisfied and dripping with sweat the greenish smears floating in the toilet bowl—gripped with vehemence—you can't understand the pathology you inherited and of which you remain a victim, longing after a purely emotion-driven listening. Unfortunately, I've never met this blessed reverend live. Amen.

My illiteracy and underestimation of the rockabilly/psychobilly genres make me disdain the petty cash I have to pay, as I listen to my heart pump boogie while the scores of this "Spend A Night In The Box" (2000) deliver to the third millennium B.C. the duo of genres adequately styled for the occasion. I have reconstructed the curriculum vitae et miraculorum of this band armed with guitar, double bass, and drums and studied it despite having little to peruse. But the music, I've heard it all. I've made my Adam's apple piston like my eardrums through musical induction. It's not a given that you play Reverend Horton Heat and end up like Bukowski. But a little fizz at home fits just right. Keeping my elbow in check, I consider this album the best stamped by the moniker Reverend Horton Heat. Because it perfectly balances the two different artistic concepts of rocka and psycho, it tips its hat to those who plowed the fields fifty years ago, it doesn't allow rust to turn music strummed technically better than the pioneers into an antiquarian crust, and it becomes, thanks to its flowing from a culture far more evolved and open to the old without blinders to the new, a rock 'n' roll 2.0.

The title track is dance floor music. Just to cap it off, drumsticks and fingers set a rhythmic frenzy that invites a dance making skirts fly up and revealing underwear. An opening rock 'n' roll that doesn't stomp brutally and finds its promising qualities in Reverend Jim Heat's solos, in his voice that doesn't yield to tobacco, and in the constant frequency backing vocals that would stupefy anyone not right in the head. Indeed, the lace woven from the first track lays out a pattern upon which, from time to time, the intertwining of sunny tracks or underground boogie with a high BPM rate (Big D Boogie Woogie above all) develops. When the piano joins in, the musical affair takes on qualitatively unexpected connotations: it feels like being in a saloon where Elvis and Berry duet dressed as cowboys (Sleeper Coach Driver). There's also genius in this album, well measured but challenging parsimony in tracks like The Girl In Blue, a swaying invitation to use it directed at a Tarantino who should RSVP, or Sue Jack Daniels traveling the roads of stagecoaches loaded with cash to assault, offering up plenty of dust to eat. Some might recall a song by Mano Negra, King Of The Bongo, which at the moment doesn't come to mind. It's the jolly and astonishing, styled and glitzy, treacherous and villainous atmospheres covered by a cloak of hedonistic fun (see The Donnas – Spend The Night) that compel me to a collapse of resistance. They play as effortlessly as ZZ Top, in a sort of Dallas Confidential from poor dead composition turned rich posthumously. And so, history is taken and made to dance with the die-hard Hand It To Me (hey doll...) and I'll Make Love, the action spectrum ranging from Elvis to Enuff Z'Nuff, intersecting the perpendicular of RHH. It Hurts Your Daddy Bad is the song of this album. With the lowercase “l”, indeed. Composed and ladylike, it elbows its way among other songs, this one with retro pop influences that decisively shifts the album's inclination towards psycho. Injections of Buscaglione-ism and Southern rock hybridize the juice of King (an intro that annihilates ska-punk in 3 seconds) and Whole Lotta Baby. The curl on the forehead becomes metallic like the barrel of a Winchester on a cowboy in the desert instrumental gallop of The Millionaire and in Unlucky In Love, stifling obsessive country. The Party In Your Head, the closing track, is the award for the album's entire songwriting which with brazen irony captures various boogie themes, reconstructing them in a contemporary key and several contemporary themes, rebuilding them in a boogie key.

The work smoothly executed in the recording studio by the three Texans is and will remain a trace of acrobatic inspiration marking the transition from a subgenre to a true genre, thanks to the example set by a guitarist first and then a vocalist, resilient and amphetamine-fueled, and by two traveling companions who knew how to support, amplifying it, the lust to escape the desert and take a spin around the world that is still ongoing today. If there were customs for the new generation r 'n' r of the southern States, today there are no more. And even the garage, upon close inspection, has been cleaned out.

4.5.