American Band - Out 9.30.16

A powerful and legitimately provocative work, hard edged and finely honed, the album is the sound of a truly American Band – a Southern American band – speaking on matters that matter. DBT made the choice to direct the Way We Live Now head on, employing realism rather than subtext or symbolism to purge its makers’ own anger, discontent, and frustration with societal disintegration and the urban/rural divide that has partitioned the country for close to a half-century. Fueled by a just spirit of moral indignation and righteous rage, AMERICAN BAND is protest music fit for the stadiums, designed to raise issues and ire as the nation careens towards its most momentous election in a generation.
AMERICAN BAND’s considerable force can in part be credited to the sheer musical strength of the current Drive-By Truckers line-up, with Hood and Cooley joined by bassist Matt Patton, keyboardist/multi-instrumentalist Jay Gonzalez, and drummer Brad Morgan – together, the longest-lasting iteration in the band’s two-decade history.

AMERICAN BAND follows ENGLISH OCEANS and 2015’s IT’S GREAT TO BE ALIVE!, marking the first time DBT have made three consecutive LPs with the same hard-traveling crew.

This album will release on September 30, 2016. 

I'm a singer/songwriter turned filmmaker out of Los Angeles, CA.  You can find my film score/instrument music at soundcloud.com/pauljmeredithcomps and my film work at www.pauljmeredithfilms.com

Instead of counting streams, chasing likes on social media, or making thirty second videos desperately begging for attention on that Tik Tak or whatever it's called, Slackeye Slim has always stayed true to himself, his love for the West, and his accidentally earned enigmatic reputation.   Amused by a rumor he saw circulating online that he didn’t actually exist, he decided to run with it.  

“Like many of the leathered-skinned, sand-blasted, sullen and desperate characters which populate his stories, Slackeye Slim seems more apparition than man, shifting in and out of the material consciousness, showing up when you least expect him, and disappearing for years at a time in between.” - Saving Country Music 

Slackeye Slim has been the de facto OG of the western genre since 2006. Taking influence from an abrupt decision to move to Butte, Montana at the age of 21 and working for a year as a classic country radio DJ, Slackeye Slim abandoned his early influences in punk and metal and traded them in for country music. After struggling to make ends meet in Montana, he returned to his native Ohio and got his start singing the over-the-top cowboy songs found on his first album "Texas Whore Pleaser" accompanied by distorted acoustic guitar at legendary punk rock dive bars like Annabelle's in Akron.

Coming up during the rise of the early 2000’s underground country scene, a movement in which he never fit in, he now finds himself not fitting in with the current resurgence of western musicians. No matter what was in fashion at the time, he has always chosen to pursue music on his own terms without worrying about the outcome; quietly pouring over his songs, releasing them for free or pay what you want, and then immediately vanishing into the emptiness of the American West again to live outside of the spotlight. 

Slackeye Slim has been described as “what it would sound like if Ennio Morricone wanted to be Link Wray when he grew up” - No Depression. “He never intended to be a part of any genre, but it didn’t stop his 2011 album El Santo Grial: La Pistola Piadosa from becoming one of the best western-inspired albums in the dying gasps of the alternative country movement.” - The Musical Divide 

While all eyes were on him following the release of his second album "El Santo Grial: La Pistola Piadosa," Slackeye weighed his options. With things linings up in his favor to break out of the underground, he decided to skip touring life and instead moved to a 2000 acre ranch in western Colorado. He began working on his third album, "Giving My Bones to the Western Lands." Recorded entirely in the abandoned homestead buildings on the ranch, this album marked a shift in focus from metaphysical cowboy tales to more personal songwriting, although there was still plenty of irreverent gunslinger swagger to be found. 

In the spring of 2020, Slackeye decided to use his music to help raise money for organizations on the front lines of covid relief. Performing several online streams from remote and incredibly scenic locations around SW Colorado, and organizing a benefit for Navajo and Pueblo covid relief, he was able to help raise nearly $10,000 dollars from all of his fundraising efforts.

Currently, Slackeye Slim lives in the middle of nowhere in the desert of Southwest Colorado where he raises a family, roams the surrounding canyon country in search of Ancestral Puebloan ruins, and builds his own instruments.

He is working on his fourth album, slated to be released sometime in late 2022 or early 2023.

The Dirt Scab Band has taken the traditional country and old time sound and subjected it to the power and freedom of a garage band. In many ways the music sounds as thick and humid as Alabama air in August. Tales of idle-handed adventures, failed loves, and corrupted souls are complimented with overdriven fingerpicked guitar, growling fiddles, and a neck stomping rhythm section. Unlike many bands that utilize traditional Southern and Appalachian styles, The Dirt Scab Band does not mock or romanticize the South. Instead, they embrace the imperfections, contradictions, and unbridled energy of Southern life.

Songs like “Life of Experiments” reflect on the boredom and apathy of youth. The anthemic “Great Newness” galvanizes like-minded cretins with lyrics like “feel that static on our fingertips/ it dances around while we stand still/ a pocket full of hate and the power of a kiss/ we’re all a part of The Great Newness.” The ghostly pace of “Chasing Time” expresses the challenges of making a living and forgoing old friends, hangouts, and lovers.

The Dirt Scab Band have created a sound with elements of shiftless high school punk, desperate mountain ballads, old time dance tunes, and an outlaw country attitude all saturated with the wit, passion, and sarcasm of real life in the swamps of the Deep South.

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