No Covers    CD    18-02-08 

Hayseed Dixie

American Rockgrass raconteurs Hayseed Dixie release their seventh album “No Covers”, a new full length album for 2008 of all original material. And this time around, the term “original material” means both that they wrote all the songs themselves and also that you’ve never heard anything quite like it. Well … honestly when have you ever heard anything quite like a Hayseed Dixie album?

Seven years of touring the world (17 countries, 612 gigs – 234 in the UK in the past 3 years alone) being the hardest working band in Europe has its own impact on a band and their musical approach. After playing nearly every festival, big or small, in Europe and watching every other band employ drums and electric guitars, the Hayseed boys decided they wanted to put a bit of that instrumentation into their own music. Says singer Barley Scotch, “We really wanted to stick a finger in the face of all those people who once called Bob Dylan a Judas.” Thus, half of the songs are acoustic and half are fully electric. Rockgrass, the musical genre created by Hayseed Dixie, has finally come full circle.

And the lyrics may surprise people who have written the Dixie off on previous albums as merely a slapstick novelty act. For example, the first song “Bouncing Betty Boogie” could be about chatting up a loose girl in a bar … or it could be about sarcastically yet sincerely daring a land mine to dance. We could say that this album heralds the ascendance of a major new songwriting voice, but by the time history makes that decision conclusively, all of us currently alive will be dead, so draw your own conclusions and strike the pose of Ozymandius if you must.