I got an email the other day that’s the best news I’ve had all year. The Dexateens are releasing their new album, Singlewide and for the first time ever, they’re going to tour to promote it! You probably don’t know who The Dexateens are, but in my little part of the world, they get as much play as any other band I’ve ever followed. They were my New Favorite Band back before someone at Fox pissed me off and I quit my occasionally updated and hardly read blog. They have too many releases to maintain that title, so they just fall into the category of one of My All-Time Favorite Bands Ever category.
I found out about them in the best way to find out about a band. I was shopping at My Mind’s Eye in Lakewood, OH and in the miscellaneous “Ds” I saw their first album. I liked the cover, and I loved their name. I flipped it over and saw they were on Estrus and I figured the odds were damned good that this band was gonna have some guitar firepower. I have always shopped like that, and I usually have good luck. I had a few other things that day and when I got in my car I listened to those while I was driving around doing my job. I never got around to The Dexateens that day, but the next day I looked at the stack of new stuff and popped that in first and headed for the other side of town.
I don’t know what it is about twangy punk that I like, but it’s something. I never cared much for Southern Rock, mostly because I never much cared for The South, I guess. I live as far North as you can get in my part of the country, and if you go a few miles north in Lake Erie, you’re in Canada. So I feel a lot more in common with that nation than I do with the Deep South of my own country. I hate the racism and the stereotypes of The South, and my few dealings and visits there didn’t do anything to change my mind. When I popped in the first Dexateens album and “Cardboard Hearts” staggered up and slapped me in the face I knew I was gonna be hooked. This was fast, sloppy, loud and just made me want to knock off early, get some beers and make some noise!
The Dexateens, “Cardboard Hearts”
I had started listening to Drive By Truckers around that time, and I was seeing that the music coming out of The South was completely different from what I thought it would be. I like DBT, but I’m not one of their legendary fans. They just made me think I shouldn’t judge 50 or so million people by some hang-ups I had. I’d been listening to Lucero a lot and I was feeling pretty wrong about a lot of my preconceptions of The South, and here was a band that just seemed all fired up for fun. I was totally unprepared for “Cherry,” a 200 mph bitter diatribe against Bobby Frank Cherry, a white guy that bombed a Black church in 1963, killed four Black girls and lived free to boast about it until 2002. Then he was tried and put in jail, and that’s where the SOB died. These guys – The Dexateens – seemed like a band I could really get behind. By the time the Stonesy “Shelter” played, I really thought I might just play the first five songs on this album all day and never move past them. I started looking all over to see if they would play in Cleveland, because I couldn’t wait!
When their second album, Red Dust Rising, came out in 2005, I was ready for another sonic assault with some decent lyrics and plenty of guitars. They were still on Estrus and I was pretty sure that it would just be more of the same, but that sameness would be just fine by me. What I got was still plenty of guitars, but more twang, and a more deliberate pace. I was thinking maybe they needed a slow song so they could take a break a little during their shows, but this was different. I had tried finding out something about them, and it led me to a band called The Quadrajets who were a big influence on The Dexateens. I really assumed Red Dust Rising would be the same thing, and I was wrong. They still played some things fast and loud, but they were tighter and their sound was more their own. It’s definitely Southern Rock, but where that wall used to be impenetrable to me, their attitude and good sense to use many loud guitars whenever possible had me won over. I hate picking songs from this album for you, because I think everyone should have this one and there isn’t a weak spot on it. I think “Take Me to the Speedway” portrays their frustration of things in The South, but it works as a personal relationship, which I think is something Southerners feel more deeply than those of us up North. “Devoted to Lonesome” almost caught me by surprise, but that had already happened with the title track, and I knew I had found a band that I could really get behind. Still no Cleveland shows, though. I consoled myself with the boogie of “Pistol Totin’ Man.”
The Dexateens, “Take Me to the Speedway”
The Dexateens, “Devoted to Lonesome”
The Dexateens, “Pistol Totin’ Man”
(Much more after the jump!)
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