Southern Culture on the Skids

Dang. A body sure can get powerful hungry listenin’ to these folks on the phonograph. Sometimes it seems like every song is about corn liquor, fried chicken, cooked possum, tuna fish, biscuits, chitlins or banana pudding. It’s like having someone sing you the Luby’s menu. When Rick, Mary and Dave from Southern Culture on the Skids aren’t paying playful homage to regional cuisine, they’re tackling lofty subjects like El Caminos, cheap motels, shotguns and people who wrestle with bears in bars. It’s all about good times — if your idea of a good time involves playing “Dueling Banjos” with an inbred teenager while Ned Beatty squeals like a pig. Thankfully, the Skids are bona fide Southerners and can poke the kind of fun that might get some Yankees strung up by their genitals. The group eschews ’70s Southern rock in favor of rockabilly, swamp boogie, gritty blues and surf. The Technicolor campiness of the B-52s lies in sin with the Southern humor of Eudora Welty. As testament to the group’s trailer-park credentials, its music has appeared on the soundtrack of Beavis and Butthead Do America. Its contribution is the fittingly titled “White Trash.”