Watermelon Slim & The Workers

With ubiquitous cowboy hat, pervasive National steelguitar and song titles like “Skinny Women and Fat Cigars” and “Hank WilliamsYou Wrote My Life,” there seems little doubt that Watermelon Slim and companyare straight out of ZZ Top country. Slim’s latest, a batch of trucker songs,complete with props to various Southern cities and stereotypical hard-drinking,lazy-going ways of life, only builds on his tobacco-stained oeuvre.

The fact that the guitarist is Boston-born and acard-carrying Mensa member does little to negate this hardscrabble, Deep South imageryespecially with Slim’s spittle soblatantly flying between teeth gaps throughout. Lists of what he likes pile up(“double shots of Wild Turkey”) and rub alongside heartaches (“I heard thecrash on the highway”), while the endless merits of the open road (“three bigol’ asphalt lanes”) always beckon. The front-porch familiarity and Bud-swillingsense of what matters leave a consistentif only a bit hackneyedslice ofred-state Americana,but such an old-school, rootsy straddle of blues and country harkens back to atime before such demographic terms really mattered.

And while it’s the reverence for the namelesstrucker that makes this a good one for the road, that continuous focus alsorenders it a unique type of good ol’ boy concept album. At the same time,there’s enough twang to do-si-do ’til dawn on a Friday night and just enoughsleaze to act as an anti-Garth Brooks, anti-Nashville reminder of how toothlessand shit-kicking country can be.