BLOODKIN FEATURED IN ROLLING STONE
Rolling Stone Magazine /Issue 1073/March 5, 2009
"Fricke’s Picks" / By David Fricke
Southern Blood Brothers
My new definition of underground: singer-guitarist Daniel Hutchens and guitarist Eric Carter, friends since they met in elementary school in Ripley, West Virginia, and, for the past 23 years, the sturdy, stubborn axix of the Athens, GA band Bloodkin. The group’s new album of range-war guitar fire and Southern-Gothic turmoil, Baby, They Told Us We Would Rise Again (SCI-Fidelity) is the first Bloodkin record I’ve ever heard. It is, in fact, their eighth-they debuted in 1994 with Good Luck Charm – and that doesn’t include two solo outings by Hutchens, Bloodkin’s main songwriter, and six CD’s of unreleased material dating back to 1988, coming in an imminent box set. Bad luck, worse business, and the wrong kinds of fun have kept Bloodkin below most folks’ radar, with some exceptions. Widespread Panic, also of Athens, have covered Bloodkin songs live and on record (Panic’s version of “Can’t Get High,” from Good Luck Charm, was an FM hit in ’94), while longtime fan Patterson Hood of the Athens’ Drive-By Truckers wrote the join-the-club liner notes for this album.
So I’m late – but happy with my timing. On Baby, Bloodkin are at a hot peak in their odyssey, opening with the hypnotic hell of “The Viper,” a catalog of addictions checked off by Hutchens in a belly-to-the-bar drawl against a Seventies-Neil Young tornado of banjo, dirty guitars and prairie-chapel organ. The spike and slash of Carter and Eric Marinez’s guitars in “Wait Forever” suggest Keith Richards and Ron Wood – armed with Civil War bayonets. “Heavy With Child” and “Little Margarita” combine the uncomplicated surge of early Wilco and the sunshine soul of the Allman Brothers Band on Eat a Peach. There may be no better description of America’s original family values than Hutchens’ reference in the acid-country jangle of “Rhododendron” to a “touch of Old Testament iron/And a whiff of wild rhododendron.” He and Carter certainly make no excuses for how long its taken them to hit daylight. “We were inspired or stupid or a little of each,” Hutchens sings over the gnarled twang in “A Place to Crash.” “We were just country boys speaking in tongues.” On Baby, They Told Us We Would Rise Again, Bloodkin talk loud and straight. And I have a lot of catching up to do.
The full Bloodkin discography reads as follows:
GOOD LUCK CHARM (1994)
CREEPERWEED (1996)
OUT OF STATE PLATES (1999)
ALL DOLLED UP (live) (2000) [out of print]
THE BLOODKIN COMMUNITY GOSPEL REHAB (2001)
RAVIN' BEAUTIES (2002)
LESSER (Daniel Hutchens solo) (2003)
LAST NIGHT OUT (2005)
LOVESONGS FOR LOSERS (Daniel Hutchens solo) (2006)
BABY, THEY TOLD US WE WOULD RISE AGAIN (2009)
You should create your own MySpace Layouts like me by using nUCLEArcENTURy.COM's MySpace Profile Editor!
