REVIEW: Reverend Horton Heat, Spend A Night In The
Box
- Michael Van Gorden
A confession: I have to admit that I have never heard a note of The Reverend's music. For different reasons I always dismissed him and his music and just never paid it any mind. But when I listened to Spend A Night In The Box, I knew this album was hot. From the first note to the last, I could not stop moving, and dancing and regretting I had ignored the Right Reverend for so long.
The album kicks off, and I do mean kicks off, with the title track "Spend A Night In The Box", a song inspired by the movie Cool Hand Luke and detailing the punishment our hero receives if he steps out of line with his little lady.
Of course the obligatory songs about truck drivin', drinkin', and lovin' are all present and accounted for. But the Reverend and his band inject a newness and most importantly a sense of humor to themes and sounds done many times before. In "Sue Jack Daniels" the protagonist lets us know that "I'm gonna sue Jack Daniels for hittin' me / With the trunk of a big old oak tree...he pushed me into a thorny old bush / Pulled about a hundred needles out of my tush".
Great literature? No. Fun, good time rock and roll? You bet. In fact from start to finish the Reverend and his congregation deliver. On "The Bedroom Again" they slow things down slightly for a little old time country pickin' which finds the singer longing for the lovin' that used to be, a longing made even more pathetic by the fact that the couple are now divorced.
Bassist Jimbo Wallace keeps the soon to be classic truck drivin' anthem "Sleeper Coach Driver" moving right along with his staccato on speed bass line, never missing a beat as Heat describes the ultimate rig: "45 feet long and 11 feet tall / 14 televisions, shower and all / two refrigerators and a satellite dish / I'll drive this sleeper coach wherever this wish."
Seems after all this time the Reverend and I have a lot in common, his favorite song on the CD, same as mine is the cool, slick ballad "The Girl In Blue". Using spring reverb to give the song its back room 60's feel, the Reverend once again is preaching about the evils of the Girl in Blue, all the while wishing from afar that things were a little closer.
The album draws to a close with even more hot guitar and irresistible boogie with the instrumental called "the millionaire". Perhaps not a true instrumental as the one line "Now you're the millionaire" echoes in the background from time to time, Heat still scorches your ear drums with some of the hottest, greasiest guitar I have heard in a long time. Jimbo Wallace and Scott Churilla on drums hold down the fort, driving the Reverend into a guitar frenzy. Not giving you anytime to breathe "Unlucky In Love" is the sad tale of a man who can't seem to find his true love, and he has tried many times: My first love she left me alone / my second love she cut me to the bone / my third, fourth and fifth lord tell me up above / why am I unlucky in love".
The music was recorded outside of Austin, TX, in Willie Nelson's Pedernales Studios, and was produced by ButtHole Surfer's Paul Leary. In fact, the Reverend feels this album at times sounds like the Surfers mixed with Jerry Lee Lewis, an apt description indeed. This disc proves that not everything you hear has to have some deep meaning, nor does it have to break new experimental ground to be enjoyable. Sometimes it just has to be Rock and Roll. Honest, from the gut rock and roll. On Spend A Night In The Box The Reverend Horton Heat delivers.
