Trailer Bride has been to the bona fide crossroads. Their second Bloodshot release, "whine de Lune", finds bandleader Melissa Swingle throttling slide guitar, mandolin, banjo, organ and saw (!)in a lock-homed slugfest between Satan and sanity.

The eleven Swingle-penned originals on "Whine de Lune" unfold with the sick gothic grandeur of a Flannery O'Connor collection. Tunes like "Work on the Railroad" and "Dirt Nap" spin hard4uck stories of pretty gals gone to seed who tal(e on deatL like they're biting into ~ ovempe peach. And if one of the dancer~ at Trailer Bride's "Clermont Hotel" was eyeballing you, believe me--you'd best drop your beer and run. Remember, she may have a sweet smile and a voice like blackberry syrup, but she just might have her last lover buried under the back porch steps.

Trailer Bride have been charming their way into Bloodshot's black little heart since acclaimed 1998 release, "Smelling Salts". They put the sex in "Sex Beat" on Alejandro Escovedo's "Bourbonitis Blues", and later on this year they'll provide the "Poor Little Critter in the Road" on our upcoming Knitters tribute "Poor Little Knitter in the Road" (look for that one in early October).

Like a corn liquor-fueled version of Velvet Underground led by a slurring and purring Blanche DuBois--or a bunch of slinky-fuff pineywoods blues punks on drums, lap steel and stand-up bass with Melissa Swingle wailing and sassing like a femme fatale Lighinin' Hopkins out front--Trailer Bride are pure Dixie--creepy and cool.
 

BLOODSHOT RECORDS 3039 W. Irving Park Rd. Chicago IL 60618-3538 U.S.A.
phone: 773-604-5300 fax: 773-604-5019 www.bloodshotrecords.com
 

Excerpted from
We're Earnest, and Contagious:
How grunge killed alternative country, and why Trailer Bride could save it
by Glen Hirshberg

In the heart of the heart of country, the worm continues to feed. Elsewhere in the diaspora of fin-de-siecle American pop, the survivors of the grunge apocalypse have begun to gather and hunt. Some huddle together in desperately defined niches (drum 'n' bass, alternative, post-rock), True Believers clinging to self-imposed structural guidelines as a substitute for inspiration. A brave few strike out on wild, personal paths, disappearing into uncharted musical somcwheres of unknown habitability and promise.
But in the backwaters of the nation's rural-aspiring youth, the plague that grunge unleashed runs rampant. They wield electric guitars and edgier tempos than traditional country musicians. They espouse a kinship with Patsy Cline and Hank Sr. that the Nashville establishment has supposedly abandoned. And almost all of suffer from a crippling self-awareness that strangles much of the music before it takes its first breath.

Not until I heard Smelling Salts, the second CD from North Carolina's Trailer Bride, though, did I understand what I'd been missirig all this time: The problem with Tod Snider, Whiskeytown, Wayne "The Tr~in' Hancock, almost every insurgetit country artist, is that they're not scared enough.

!w)hat makes Patsy Cline's "Walking" so haunting, even now, is the sen~ that th~ ~~iger believes she may not get back... Hank Williams' drawling declaration that "There'll be no teardrops tonight" h~lds no promises about tomorrow A~~'ht. In country music, even more than in most pop forms, the loss of the lover (or drinkn~ habi~, ~r car, or faith~or homegrown tomatoes) has to hurt. Otherwise, what possible excuse is there for all that whimpering?

Even before singer Melissa Swingle opens her mouth, Trailer Bride sounds fresher, stranger, more contemporary than virtually all its contemporaries. "Wildness" bucks and kicks on a barely controlled slide-guitar line and upbeat-driven rhythm, while "Graveyard," which is about walking in one, glides on a bluesy whisper of a rif{ mustering so much quiet menace that it could almost pass for goth, except for its guilelessness.

But Swingle is the key. Her lyrics involve moonlight, beatings and buzzards, as well as the de rigeur jealous lovers and lost souls. Her voice is throaty like Patsy's, but her delivery is closer to Hank's, all flat expressionlessness that doesn't mask the yearning -- for love, self, peace, God. She can sing about abusive relationships and sound like a survivor, and she can sing about wanting to save her songs for the front porch and sound scared to death. In "Porch Song," the narrator's mother admonishes, 'That's a pretty good song, but you oughtta be singing for Jesus." The singer responds, "I know I should, someday I just mi4itlhope Jesus will forgive me tonight," and in that moment, mischievous playfulness, fear of death, hunger for sex and love of music tangle together into the sort of gloriously complicated epiphany I'd forgotten country music could manage.
 

Whether the emergence of Trailer Bride signals a way out for No Depression-style music or simply the arrival of a blazing and singular talent remains to be seen. Regardless, Smelling Salts serves as a startling reminder that archness is not necessarily a sign of intelligence, that getting the joke can deny you wonder, that getting found might get you saved, but getting scared can get you art.

BLOODSHOT RECORDS 3039 W. Irving Park Rd. Chicago IL 60618-3538 U.S.A.