The Bottle Rockets

The Bottle Rockets will forever be linked with Uncle Tupelo. Yet the Missouri outfit has always been way more Nashville than their post-Dinosaur Jr. peers. Then again, the Bottle Rockets' sophomore album, 1995's The Brooklyn Side, finds the group equally influenced by John Prine's slice-of-life cynicism and the ragged twang of Neil Young and Crazy Horse. So yeah, they aren't Randy Travis or anything; simply check out the chunky distorto-riffs of "Sunday Sports" or the nasty humor of "Radar Gun" -- "Radar gun, radar gun/ I'm making money and having fun/ With my radar gun."

On their major-label debut, the Bottle Rockets achieve what Lynyrd Skynyrd often tried to
do but never quite pulled off. Without sacrificing their identity as a proud blue-collar rock &
roll band, the Bottle Rockets obliterate the redneck stereotype that has long been
attached to Southern-style rock. This Festus, Mo., band's down-home roots flow naturally
from the chunky rhythms, slide guitar, fiddle, mandolins and warm Ronnie Van Z... More >

More raucous and pointed than such fellow Midwestern alternacountry-rockers as the Jayhawks, Uncle Tupelo, and Blood Oranges, these citizens of Festus, Missouri will hit you where you live when they lay out other people's pains and foibles--the welfare mom on Saturday night, the Sunday sports abuser, the constable with his radar gun, the local Dinosaur Jr. fan. They also speak plain truth when they criticize their car. And if they seem to relive cliches when they confess their many romantic errors, how do you think cliches get that way? (Including this one.) (Grade - A-)