Two Fingers of Firewater - Two Fingers Of Firewater Album Review

Two Fingers of Firewater

Album Review

Two Fingers of Firewater is a fantastic name for a band, and was the first thing that drew me to this promo giving me puppy dog eyes from my email. My curiosity was more piqued by the fact that they're an alt-country act from Guildford of all places, and the juxtapositioning of the genre with their hometown pushed my curiosity from piqued into fully fledged 'must know' territory. And the good news is that I have nothing but good things to report.

It's very easy to draw comparison to the whisky drenched country sounds of Uncle Tupelo and The Jayhawks as you listen, and they really do sound fresh out of mid-western America, despite hailing from the other side of the Atlantic. The opening number 'Satan, Your Kingdom Must Come Down' immediately kill the idea they this may be a more modern interpretation of country as recently demonstrated by Ryan Adams, and the corpse of this possibility is thoroughly dismembered by the opening chords of 'South Bank Girl' which has the country guitar and grizzled delivery you would expect from a band fresh out of a saloon - with country style distortion, peddle steel guitars, banjos and mandolins it's fairly safe to assume that if country music has always left you cold, then this will do nothing to change that. If you are aurally open minded and don't shut up shop as soon as you hear the breeze of a harmonica though, you will find a lot to love here. The instrumentation is tight, the tunes are memorable and heartfelt and the song writing and lyrics are splendid. You don't realise quite how accomplished the band are with their instruments until the brilliant instrumental track of B Mando is stuck in your head. It takes a special kind of band (or a dreadful vocalist - thankfully not the case here) to make an instrumental amongst the stand out tracks and Two Fingers of Firewater are very much that band.

Just when you think you have the band pegged as a harmonica wielding wannabe hillbillies, they surprise you - 'The Beginning' slows things down for 2 minutes with an eerie post-rock sounding slow down, before the gear changes back again. It's these kind of quirks and idiosyncrasies which lift the album from "pleasant" to excellent. After one listen, you may find the album a peculiar mess - a mixture of tracks which don't seem to gel, yet with repeat listens you discover that there is method to the madness - and what a fine method it is too. Lo-fi country blues may never be fashionable, but this proves it can be a brilliant antidote to the hook-filled, accent inspired indie that's filling the charts at the moment.

Alan Martin