Album Review

Hayseed Dixie – Breaking The Law

• 16th Aug 2007

Comedy is unforgiving, it’s either funny or it’s not; music has a slightly larger scale as something can be fairly average-even poor- and get by. So then what happens when the two are combined?-well in recent cases, Tenacious D were very successful, songs that were both hilarious and catchy. Further back does anyone remember Richard Cheese?, here was a guy that fused lounge jazz with metal, rock and rap by covering classics such as Van Halen’s ‘Running with the devil’. Good comedy however is like good music-it’s timeless. Monty python songs will always be funny and will constantly be rediscovered ad infinitum.

Hayseed Dixie’s one trick pony is to play various rock/metal songs in a country/bluegrass style- all banjos’s and finger picking madness. It’s testament to how radical these thrashed together sounds are, because it takes a while for you to realise what song is actually being covered as the main riff is awash with instruments being plucked at light speed. The song in question is Judas Priest’s ‘Breaking the law’ and when the chorus breaks it becomes once again familiar.

When someone launches a satirical assault on the prime minister or president-people cry out that such shots are an affront to their office, but really these are massive figures that should be able to have their ideologies assaulted- if they can’t stand up to biting comedy it can’t be that strong a system. The same is true of bands who get annoyed when musicians outside of their musical spectrum cover their songs. When Deep Purple toured a few years ago, for example they came off stage to Rolf Harris’s version of ‘Smoke on the water’-clearly a sense of humour is important.

Fans of the priest will show a cursory interest, and it is amusing for a while, but it’s difficult to see the joke lasting an album, and much easier to see rock dj’s across the world buying the song to play at the end of the night to show how ‘Quirky’ they are.