Kudzu Kings

If you want to get at least a vague idea of what the Kudzu Kings sound like on this album, picture in your mind a really good country band that has been playing the biker bar scene for a while. They're tight and energetic and rowdy, and everybody works together really well. Now lock that band in a room with a whole bunch of Grateful Dead and Phish CDs and several dozen cases of beer, and tell them that they can only come out when the beer is gone and they have heard every album at least twice. The band that will come out of that room will be the Kudzu Kings, and the first thing they'll do when they emerge from captivity is record this album. They will make music that will toss together honky tonk, country-rock, and intense jamming, and many of the songs will be about getting drunk, getting laid, and being broke. Not all of them — there will be some wise songs about relationships, like "It's a Play" and "Streetwalkin," and perhaps a bit of free-form poetry set to music, like "Amsterdam." Still, the focus is on party music, like the wacky "Rototiller" (and you only wonder why the singer's mother felt it was an appropriate gift) and "Uninvited," a song about an ingenious party crasher. The apex of the album, the track that pushes this over the edge to greatness, is "I Love Beer." Even among the formidable catalog of country songs about getting drunk, this delirious ode to boozing stands out for sheer zaniness. The band sounds like they're having a great time, and when you listen to them you will, too.