Music / Reviews
Live Review: Nashville Pussy, Thekla
It’s one of those scenes Hollywood always gets wrong. Our heroes take a wrong turn and find themselves in a bar full of menacing rednecks, somewhere in the deep south. There’s a band playing behind chicken wire on stage. But look closer and you’ll see they’re too clean, their denim too fashionably distressed. Those temporary tattoos are rather obvious, the designer stubble too carefully cultivated, and they’re playing sanitised blues-rock aimed at shifting soundtrack albums to a mainstream demographic in what the suits describe excitedly as marketing synergy. In reality, they’d be a dirty, sleazy, heavy rock’n’roll act. They’d be Nashville Pussy.
Using the Outlaws’ ace cover of (Ghost) Riders in the Sky as their intro, Atlanta’s hairiest Pussy swiftly get down to addressing their staple subjects: sex (Keep On Fuckin’), drugs (High as Hell) and, um, more sex (Struttin’ Cock) and more drugs (She’s Got the Drugs). Portly, cowboy-hatted frontman Blaine Cartwright leaves it to the female members of the band, Bonnie Buitrago and Ruyter Suys (one of the world’s 12 greatest women guitarists according to that noted authority on the subject, Elle magazine), to work up most of the sweat. Suys, in particular, hurls herself around the stage without missing a note, tossing her cockscrew curls like a more comely lady version of Twisted Sister’s Dee Snider, and spitting beer all over the audience. Stand-in drummer Rob Hulsman, on loan from Robert Plant’s band, works both beard and drums like a true pro.
For the most part, Nashville Pussy trade in short, sharp three-minute bursts of high-energy rock that sound rather like Motorhead, had Lemmy’s mob been raised on a diet of country music. The thoroughly reprehensible break-up song Go To Hell is a rare foray into pure southern rock that works so well you wish they’d write more in this vein. There’s social commentary too. Kind of. Introducing the splendid The South’s Too Fat to Rise Again, Cartwright remarks: “Hundreds of years ago, my ancestors emigrated from England to the South East United States, where they got fatter and fatter and fatter. Believe me, man, I’m one of the slim ones.”
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At one point, he falls flat on his face. It looks a bit dicey as he lies there motionless. But a roadie scuttles on and peels him off the floor and he carries on as though nothing has happened, all the way to the encore double whammy of Go, Motherfucker, Go and You’re Goin’ Down from the band’s Let Them Eat Pussy debut. The wheel remains resolutely un-reinvented, but if you’re looking for the perfect antidote to the current plague of dull, earnest hipster blues and Americana, you’ll find it right here.
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