The Men They Couldn’t Hang – Cherry Red Jukebox

I was thrilled to hear this album, as I’d been waiting to get my hands on a CD by this band for quite a while. I had them in mind every trip to the record shop, and to be totally honest, every time I heard that Tragically Hip song Bobcaygeon (around my house, this happens often) it renewed my search for this band’s music. Anyway, here it is and it’s a tasty disc, indeed.

I was bopping along to these great songs, and I said to myself, “Self, this sounds like a rock version of Hothouse Flowers, with maybe a little Waterboys thrown in.” Definitely an aftertaste of traditional down east stuff lingering in the back of the throat, anyway, behind the barroom rock sound. And if the singer were drunker, and singing about battles and blood, it could be a cleaned up version of some Pogues songs. High praise, in my books.

This CD would play really well at a backyard or gravel pit party, the kind where everybody has a corn on the cob in one hand and a beer in the other and they’re all dancing drunkenly around, hooting and hollering.

This was well worth the wait.