The Bottle Rockets

The Bottle Rockets, from rural Missouri, are the thinking person's hillbilly bar band. At their best, they bridge the worlds of the hicks and the hippies, blues junkies and potheads, Motorhead and Hank Williams. The songs of singer-guitarist Brian Henneman are odes to blue-collar rednecks, trailer-park denizens, and divorcees who solve their problems by downing shots, flinging fists, driving fast, or going down slow. His humor is cut by poignancy, an affection for his motley down-on-their-luck characters that is vividly descriptive but rarely judgmental.

The Bottle Rockets finds Henneman coming off his gig as a guitar roadie for Uncle Tupelo to write songs in a similar vein: countrified rock that blends electric guitars and banjo, and sparse production that frames stories of death ("Kerosene"), Southern bravado ("Wave That Flag"), and lust ("Trailer Mama").

The Brooklyn Side has a similar arc with sharper production, opening with an acoustic country ballad and then adding carefully calibrated doses of bom-bast until Henneman is ranting like a drunk in boxer shorts on the oddly moving "Sunday Sports." There are hints of Neil Young, Sun Records rockabilly, and Chuck Berry rock & roll in an album that packs a Saturday-night kick even as it acknowledges the Sunday-morning hangover.

24 Hours a Day is more concise, the specifics in songs such as the darkly comic "Indianapolis" and the rueful title track honed with literary precision, while the band perfects its mix of barbed-wire guitars and stringed instruments.

There's truth in advertising on Leftovers: Outtakes such as "Coffee Monkey" come off as amusing B sides. Brand New Year boasts the slickest sound yet on a Rockets album, at odds with the typically homespun subject matter. Songs of Sahm gets the band back on track with a collection of genre-defiant songs written by kindred spirit Doug Sahm, the late cosmic cowboy from San Antonio. The Rockets' affinity for Sahm's brand of blues, acid rock, honky tonk, and Tejano balladry stamps them as worthy heirs to his maverick Americana legacy.

Blue Sky is the most subdued Bottle Rockets yet, as the bar-band brashness of old is replaced with a more reflective tone. Henneman's songs are as oddly touching and humorous as ever, but musically, he's gone soft. (GREG KOT)

From 2004's The New Rolling Stone Album Guide