Reverend Horton Heat (aka
Jim Heath) always wanted to sound like the wildest, noisiest
rockabilly guitarist on Earth, so it was fortunate that he crossed paths with
Ministry braintrust
Al Jourgensen during his brief spell as an advocate of
roots music (and whatever happened to the
Buck Satan project,
Jourgensen's promised collaboration with
Buck Owens?). From a musical standpoint,
Liquor in the Front doesn't represent much of a change-up from
Heat's previous work; there's a bit of up-tempo
surf, a dash of old-school
country, and a man-sized portion of fast and frantic tunes about cars, girls, and hard living. But with
Jourgensen in the producer's chair, the
Reverend's guitar finally sounds as big and powerful as he always wanted it to be; the rod-rodded engineering and in-the-red mix makes for a loud, meaty guitar assault that merges technical finesse and physical power like
Muhammad Ali, and while
Jimbo Wallace's bass and
Taz Bentley's drums don't undergo quite so dramatic a transformation, they display more than enough backbone to support their leader as he burns up the fretboard.
Reverent Horton Heat was never your typical
rockabilly act, and on
Liquor in the Front he made an album that still honored the traditions of the style while kicking up more dust than he ever had before, and for sheer crank, nothing in his catalog can touch it. ~ Mark Deming
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