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WIB Listening Party #62: Souls On Fire

Vincent Abbate Leave a comment

featuring…

♫ The Neckbones, Souls On Fire

🍺 Everything Sucks DIPA

Words & photos: Vincent Abbate

 

It’s okay to write about The Neckbones once every 20 years or so, right?

I mean, sure, the band only existed for a brief, intense period starting in the mid-90s, leaving behind a trio of discs: the self-released Pay The Rent, 1999’s The Lights Are Growing Dim and today’s featured album Souls On Fire, their 1997 Fat Possum Records debut. The Neckbones’ limited shelf life didn’t stop me from falling in love with them, though. Now, some 20 odd years down the road, I still find myself returning to those albums – usually when I’m out and about and need a jolt of youthful energy. The music they left behind is vicious and exciting, sounding like it sprung from the oil-stained garage of a low-rent house right next door to Richard Hell & The Voidoids and just down the block from where Chuck Berry parked his Cadillac.

The fiery and rebellious Souls On Fire will be served today with Everything Sucks, a Double New England IPA brewed with a wheat, barley and oat malt bill. It’s a collaboration between FrauGruber Brewing and Superfreunde, two young German brands with a flair for experimentation.

The name of the beer is as close as I’ll get to commenting on the state of the world. As promised!

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WIB Listening Party #22: Sweet Tea

Vincent Abbate Leave a comment

featuring…

♫ Buddy Guy, Sweet Tea

🍺 Riedenburger Dolden Hell

Words & photos: Vincent Abbate

Yeah, so it’s heating up quite a bit ‘round these parts now. No longer any need to summon summer. It’s here. And with it, a slower pace. Even in the city.

That’s one thing I really like about the American south. People take their time in almost everything they do. I’m tempted to say it’s so because of the heat, but I’m a New Yorker and New York also gets excruciatingly hot in the summer months. But we haven’t got that take it easy thing down. Not really. Not like southern folk.

The climate around JazzFest in New Orleans is just about perfect. Really, it’s my weather ideal. The festival traditionally kicks off the last weekend of April, running into early May. Temps are in the 80s. Warm enough to knock off the rust of winter but never oppressive. Some of my favorite memories are of lounging in front of the Congo Square stage at the festival grounds, listening to funk and Caribbean sounds, soaking in the sunlight, enjoying an adult beverage.

But Mississippi in July? Yes, I have made that mistake. I’ve even camped out in the unbearable mid-summer humidity, inescapable even at night. I went to movies just to bask in the air conditioning.

Oh, right, music. It’s got to be a steamy hot record this week, a Mississippi in July kind of record. So I’m going with Sweet Tea, a #1 Billboard Blues album for Buddy Guy following its release in 2001.

The perfect beverage would be the one mentioned in the title, but since this is about blues and beer, we’ll pour a glass of Riedenburger Dolden Hell, a tasty and refreshing helles from Bavaria.

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WIB Listening Party #21: Not The Same Old Blues Crap

Vincent Abbate Leave a comment

featuring…

♫ Various Artists, Not The Same Old Blues Crap Vol. 1

🍺 La Quince CRYOBOT IPA

Words & photos: Vincent Abbate

That time from the mid-1990s on into the current millennium when Fat Possum Records was shaking up the blues world was actually pretty significant. Who among us had heard of R.L. Burnside before then? Junior Kimbrough? T-Model Ford? How many of us even knew there was such as thing as the North Mississippi Hill Country blues and that it was different from anything we’d heard before? Not many, I’d venture to guess.

And then suddenly, there it was. A weird, edgy, hypnotic, punky, groove-oriented sound, propagated by a tiny indie label operating from Oxford, Mississippi – a college town. Not coincidentally, perhaps, the music appealed to a twenty-something alternative audience who didn’t really know or care what the blues was. It didn’t matter that most of the musicians on the Fat Possum label were two or three times as old as The White Stripes. All that mattered – as the name of the label’s sampler series provocatively stated – was that it was Not The Same Old Blues Crap.

Today we’re going to give the first entry in that series a listen – an eleven-track album with cuts by Kimbrough, Ford, Burnside and several others.

To wash it down, we’ve got La Quince’s CRYOBOT IPA, a seasonal brew named for the Cryo Hops used in production and the futuristic bot on the label. As the late great Mr. Kimbrough once sang: I gotta try you girl.

So come on in … meet me in the city … ehh, enough of that …

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