GRANT PEEPLES: Down Here In The County

Grant Peeples

Down Here In The County

© 2007 Grant Peeples (837101312431)

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Alternative Country with a fist. A left-wing Hank Williams. Issues oriented twang. Smart, in your face songs. A sucker punch at the sterile sentimentality of neo-country music.

notes

Grant Peeples calls his music “Alternative Southern.” It's not a genre or sub-genre that one finds on song manifests, but it fits this unique songwriter well. This music is implicitly political, cultural and most of all, relevant.

These are songs about a South that wheezes in the shadows of ruinous real estate developments and suburban sprawl, and the steeple of the staid Episcopal Church. It is bad teeth, pit bulls and body odor, dirt under the fingernails, fast-food obesity, chain smokers, tattooed faces, shady county sheriffs. There are meth labs and racism and guns. A fearless guy on death row and a guy who ties his cheating girlfriend to the railroad tracks, only to console her with sips of whiskey as the train comes chugging around the bend. “This is real country,” explains one of these hard hitting songs. “Man, and it ain’t pretty.”

It is Flannery O’Conner set to music. Songs that almost gloat on the ugly underbelly of a class divided society, while sticking their collective tongue out at the lame sentimentality of today’s neo-country (a Peeples term) music. The sound is classic, sparse, twangy, and guitar driven, and cut from the same cloth that songwriters like Guy Clark, Lucinda Williams and Ray Wylie Hubbard knit their own tunes.

It’s all sung with Peeples’ commanding, seasoned voice. It’s a rough, edgy voice that works like a bucksaw on his recurrent themes of poverty, class struggle, hypocrisy and environmental ruin. From one song to the next, the mood shifts quickly from dark to comedic and back again. The dark is foreboding; the comedic is ironic, and always at the expense of one convention or another: church, state, the Executive branch, or the rural landscape from which Peeples himself hails.

reviews

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  • "This is Real County and It Ain’t Pretty" says it all
    author: Rob Hinchee

    This is a really unique CD, Grant wrote all the songs himself and they are all about the real rural south. No fantasy here, just the real thing. Grant has a great sound as well as a great message. Listen to a couple of his songs and you’ll want the CD. I think the genera must be Nouveau Redneck.

  • Music for travelers, and those who wish to travel
    author: John Book, Music For America

    Country music is conservative music made for conservative people? At least that's how many view it, but like any other style of music, there's more than one perspective, definitely more than one piece to the puzzle. Grant Peeples knows there's another side to country music, one that arguably gets a huge following outside of the normal country circles. He lets us know what it's really all about on a great CD called Down Here In The Country. There are those who say those "wide open spaces" explored in countless country songs is being invaded by commerce, by big business, by people from other countries, who knows at this point. What Peeples looks at is that part of country music that remains the same, whether it's about living life at a slow pace, the ugliness of a fading relationship, or death row inmates who are dying at a slow pace, along with subtle doses of love and hate. Inbetween this is a hell of a lot of humor, and he's quite good at putting his point across with a funny line or two. His voice isn't rough, but at times his songs are half-spoken with the kind of vigor that makes you want to listen. If there's one thing to say about Grant Peeples, it's that he creates honest "people music". Or "Peeples music" if you want to get technical, very down home where anyone listening to "Bloody Moon Nite", "Holy Moses, Holy Jesus, Holy Underwear", and "All Hat And No Cattle" will relate to it immediately. One hopes his music will take him places, and in a better world he would already have five television specials to his name.

  • Carl Hiaasen with a kickass band
    author: Will Thomas

    By turns knee-slapping and gut-wrenching, Peeples's lyrics call bullshit on hypocrisy whether he smells it in the bedroom or the halls of power. Like Hiaasen at his best, Peeples lines his damnations with hopes, no, demands for redemption in the natural and cultural landscapes he loves. Take a break from the passionate lyrics any time, though, and let this crack(er) band ride you along with their tight grooves and hot licks. A must-read, I mean, listen.

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