Consumer Guide Album

The Reverend Horton Heat: Liquor in the Front [Sub Pop/Interscope, 1994]
Not counting the belch-enhanced Scott Joplin closer, their best joke got lost on the way to the rack jobber: the title was Liquor in the Front, Poker in the Rear before somebody (the major label, mayhap?) took the punch line off the cover. This leaves us with a supposedly humorous male chauvinist trio playing rock-enhanced rockabilly Very Loud. College radio dogs find their mess authentic and postmodern all at once. Me, I listen in vain for a "Dixie Fried," a "One Hand Loose," even a "Ubangi Stomp"--hell, even a "Rock This Town," by the fabled and short-lived Stray Cats, who tried something similar in the dark ages of MTV. B−