Thanks for the review Patrick !
CD REVIEW: Get Hammered by Jesse & The Hogg Brothers
I don’t entirely know it as fact, but I can’t shake the notion I’ve had since listening to Jesse & The Hogg Brothers’ latest LP Get Hammered that this is a band that deeply admires the nearly imperceptible pranks and life of Andy Kaufman. The man inhabited a vast array of styles, approaches, and characters within his career, and even those closest with him never truly knew where he stood as a non-performer. There was always the possibility that you were knee-deep in some elaborate hoax just waiting to have the rug pulled out from under you. Get Hammered feels like another step towards a great Kaufman homage from Jesse & The Hogg Brothers that will leave audiences entirely unsure of where the sincerity starts, stops and rears its head.
Opening with “The Hammer,” listeners are immediately given a taste of the band’s deep-fried humor with a song that succeeds at ushering the audience in with a story that flexes the band’s knack for storytelling. It’s a fairly normal piece of music when taken at face value, but it especially feels like an outlier on the album when the next song, “Cream Gravy,” touches on… gravy. As a listener, I had to do a double-take — the song’s lyrics rely entirely on praising gravy and the variety of base ingredients it can be served with and upon. “Biker Ann” comes next and, once again, works as a story song focused on telling the cautionary tale of a doomed woman who always has “two drinks in her hand, [and] drinks more than a man.” The variety feels pretty established for the first five tracks until “Wait a Minute” enters the scene and immediately becomes the focus of something that has to be performance art.
Donning the second-longest runtime of any song on Get Hammered, this song relies entirely on… farts. Beans, beans, the magical fruit… Before the gaseous lyrics can fully leave the ears of listeners, the performance art mentality lingers in the form of the following song “Texas Hammer.” It works almost entirely as a replica of the album’s opening track, albeit maybe one percent changed to include a new word. There’s a sense the band is ultimately playing a prank on the audience, but the jokes never feel mean or ill-intentioned. Everyone is laughing together, and the laughter even literally makes itself known at the end of several tracks on the actual album.
There’s no telling where the jokes end and the sincerity behind the music begins with Get Hammered, but maybe the blurred lines between real and fake are part of the grand scheme, err… plan. (Lisa Mari makes sure to inform listeners that women don’t scheme, they plan in the upbeat country party track “Onion Ring.”) Jesse & The Hogg Brothers are undoubtedly attempting to craft music that is as entertaining as it is enjoyable in a musical sense, and there’s as little doubt in their attempts as there is in their ultimate success. Getting hammered has never been so gut-achingly funny as it has been with the Hogg Brothers.
by Patrick Orr