This road trip is all about country, blues and old time music. Old-fashioned you might say, but in the end  good songs are always in fashion and Mat deRiso is certainly capable of writing those. My own favourite is probably the rough, raw and captivating bluegrass song Ribbon Of Dirt, but it’s certainly not the only good song. Most of the songs do hit the target and inject a high dose of  raw but beautiful americana into your veins. A couple of songs like the opener Resurrection Cadillac gets a little too bluesy for my own personal preference, but it doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with those songs. That’s just not totally my kind of music. However, most of Plank Road Drag is my kind of music and it is indeed a very fine album.
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Mathew Deriso has been a fixture here on ninebullets about as long as this site has been around. Really, judging from Plank Road Drag, one could say we’ve grown up together, had ninebullets continued to get better over the years. 9B’s shortcomings aside, Plank Road Drag is Mat D’s coming out party. Mat’s past records, be it solo or with his band, The Profane Saints, have all been fine records with plenty of tracks that still live on my iPods, but Plank Road Drag is the first album that gets an unadulterated rip into my inner digital network.

Plank Road Drag consists of 10 tracks largely featuring Mat and an acoustic guitar up front and center with a minimalist set of backing instrumentation. Honestly, I think Mat is best found in his element with this setup. He has a great voice and his lyrics are solid, both of which can get clouded out when he’s putting out material with The Profane Saints. Mat says that his songwriting approach changed while the band was working on recording The Profane Saints’ last album, Dirt Town City Limits, and if that’s the case I think he needs to stick on the path he started down, ‘cause Plank Road Drag was a 2 story step above anything he’s released to date. Odds on fave for my top 10 of the year, easily Essential Listening today
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Country and blues music has always mined the life’s mundane moments and extracted nuggets of domestic mythology shimmering with love, lust, booze, blood, tears, asphalt and diesel fuel.  With these elements masters like Hank Williams Sr., Neil Young, Towns Van Zandt and Bob Dylan - and latter day troubadours like Bruce Springsteen, Steve Earle and Chris Knight - transcend whatever genre they are bridled with and forge minor pedestrian masterpieces.

This second solo release from Sioux City, IA’s Mat D (Mat deRiso) draws from the same humanistic sources. Assuming a more Americana tone than the country-rock his Profane Saints offers, Plank Road Drag works a well-worn sonic landscape but still manages to uncover many dusty gems.

The disc cranks off with Resurrection Cadillac, straight up string rockabilly with a startling twang thrown in like the sudden shock of a thrown rod at ninety miles an hour. The poetry is graphic, funny, and at times sad enough to make me laugh out loud.

The album opener is bathed in the sanctified blues of Leadbelly and Lightnin' Hopkins, lurching forward like a revved-up version of Led Zeppelin’s back-porch stomper Black Country Woman.

Street souls collide in Ford Marriage. Mat D colorfully throws his Born to Run-style tramps toward a ramshackle wedding  - “I'll trade a fan belt and a hub cap for a suit-coat and a tie, we’ll use her panties a a veil and wrap an old rag around her thigh and make a bouquet out of tumbleweeds and hold on ‘til we die, my my.” - until passion’s heat burns away all that’s left is matrimonial ash - ”Turns out a house of love don’t run on truck-stop grease and gasoline.”

Doomed romance continues with Cannonball as family plight and hardship runs as rough as their path toward Texas. Three A.M. refuels the dirt-floor romance, gliding like a fever-dream vision of trailer-part trysts. 40 Watt Moon is the fever aftermath recounting beautiful memories and empty bottles.

Ribbon of Dirt uses the hard-bluegrass of Steve Earle’s Copperhead Road to tell another hard tale of the road’s siren call and Motorbelle is a beautiful, moody white-trash serenade “she was silver and gold from the trailer, she was sequins and jewels from the trash, she was flesh, she was blood,she was lonely, spilling out of old strapless dress with her big hair all pinned up and perfect all that Tammy Faye make-up a mess.”

The album closes with the bluegrass-tinted title song, where Mat d uses hillbilly poetry that could easily be inspired by watching the Coen brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou? with the sound down and Guy Clark on the turntable turned way up high.

Mat D's Plank Road Drag is an ambitious record that hits on all cylinders to set a high water mark for any other contender for this year’s album of the year.
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...preferring to enlist the help of only one of the Profane Saints – bassist Kurt Mullins who also handled the recording and production of this ten track release, as well as playing electric guitar, fretless bass and percussion, Mat d. handles the vocals of course and arms himself with banjo, mandolin and guitar, the collaboration has yielded a far more earthy release, the sound’s pared back and stylistically it’s a big step away from Dirt Town City Limits but the transition is handled deftly and the end result is an excellent listen that gives a greater emphasis to the song-writing which is high quality stuff, tales of dirt road diners, highway dreams and dust bowl babes.
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