How bad were Old 97’s at Webster Hall earlier this year (here)? “Rhett sang his heart out, but shit, at 43 years old stop wiggling your fucking ass and calm the fuck down and play the motherfucking songs. Old 97’s keep descending to shtick. Oh, plus, and again I left early so I can’t swear to it, but why so quiet guy?” Fellow fan Steve Crawford saw em six months later and thought they were great but I dunno, it was a bad enough set to take em off my radar and the album they were pushing up, All Messed Up, was good enough to still make my Top Five of 2015.
All Messed Up is 40 minutes of sparkling, rough and tumble, state of the art of rock and roll raucousness and certainly among their very best albums: Indeed, check it out:
1. Satellite Rides
2. Fight Songs
3. All Messed Up
Yeah folks, it’s better than Too Far To Care! How dya like dat? What else can you say say about an album whose tagline is “I am the most messed up mother fucker in this town”? and gets it the old fashioned way. It earns it. what else cn you say about an album whose first four songs are the best songs you’ve ever heard and then? And then “Wheels Off” is wasting for you. It’s ridiculous. You know, it’s just plain sick. Rhett wanted to dirty his hands, wanted to get his band back into what was left of the trenches and man, did he do it.
What can you do with an album whose best song is all of them An album that ends with “Most Messed Up” and starts with “Longer Than You’ve Been Alive” and has “Nashville” bang in the middle and follows it with “Wasted”? It’s fucking great, that’s what you can say.
