The Kamikaze Hearts Oneida Road by: Greg DeGraves Mon:14-May-07 Label: One Little Indian Year: 2007 WB rating 57 out of 100

Country music sucks balls. Everyone knows it, or at least all of us who don’t have two heads and hard-ons for our cousins. So, what do you do if you’re One Little Indian, the record label who released Oneida Road by The Kamikaze Hearts? You do everything that is humanly possible to hide the fact that there is far too much laid back drawling, crying into their ale, riding tractors, kissing their sweetie’s with their fist, countrified horseshit on Oneida Road for it to be taken seriously as an ‘indie’ release.

Sure, they’ll try to fool you. They make the cover look like some slightly slap-bang version of Funeral or an early Decemberists album. But the shitty hand written font won’t fool you, will it Columbo? The only thing that isn’t trying to sell the band as an indie group is the LP’s title, Oneida Road, which probably was the destination where two young cousins first steamed the windows of their slack jawed uncle’s barn, while a cow licked at their moist and sweaty nether regions. You can paint it in any colour you like; you can slap any hybrid term on it (alt-country, post-Avril Lavinge-hipster sloth) but the only test is the music and on the whole this music is as country as fried chicken, brown liquor and slavery.

Now, if you solely listened to the first four songs of this album you’d think I am a lying sack of horse manure, and you’d be justified to come at me with your shovels and pitchforks, your humpbacked relations close in tow, dragging their limp appendages along the dusty ground. Opener ‘Top Of Your Head’ is a passable piece of alt-country and probably was one of the reasons that One Little Indian thought they could pull the wool over your eyes. The song starts all hillbilly and slightly mongoloid, but rises to a barn stomping rockout after the instrumental. Troy Pohl, one of the band’s vocalists, sells the vocal line spitting the hay from his mouth and delivering a rousing performance that justifies all the pretty pictures on the album cover: “But today you’re weeping/You’re curled up into a ball/Just the top of your head sticking out”.

The band diverts even farther from the banjos and buckteeth with ‘Defender’, while it still has a colonial drawl that may have been used to stir the loins of pre-American Revolution soldiers, the vocals are a dark, melancholy beast that evoke the spectre of the ever longing Eliot Smith. “Woah, back the boat up here, like Eliot Smith?” I can hear the dull thud of a million music jocks trying to pilfer the album before they even finish the review. As I said, for all the wading in swamplands there are four or five really decent tracks on this album and ‘Defender’ is a Herculean effort that will confuse all those who were even slightly shaken by the album cover – and that seems to be half the critics out there judging by the band’s glowing reviews, most of these pricks must have just listened to the first half, or maybe they too are related?

‘You Can’t Just Get Up And Leave’, ‘Ash Wednesday’ and ‘No One Called You A Failure’ make you think that The Kamikaze Hearts might be on the right side of that thin grey line between ‘alt-country’ and the latter half of a 200 Best Songs to Sing to Your Dog album. It’s not like there is any great ingenuity needed to decipher where the band succeeds, and where they roll around in a steamy pile: when they evoke country they sound more than respectable, they’re catchy, measured and at times even deep, but when they are country they sound like a slightly more skilled, but barely more interesting version, of that toothless, pot bellied, red-faced, boot-wearing hack that plays those Slim Dusty covers during Happy Hour at the local RSL – the big fucking joke in this is that Happy Hour is always full of chronic, jobless drunks who eat up all this “my old bag left me” shit, when in reality the only lady these circus freaks have ever frequented was either expensive or inbred.

Anyway, that’s all that’s worth saying about this album. If you think half of an album is good enough to justify a purchase then go ahead and spend you’re hard earned on this; you’re a dimwit and probably would have just lost it down a gutter anyway. But for The Kamikaze Hearts I have this to say: decide who you are going to be. If you are going to be an alt-country band, stepping outside the normal two chord layman crap, then tap me on the shoulder, wake me up and let me know. If not, go back to that dirty straw bed of yours, playing your sentimental dung, ploughing all the neighbours’ fields and their daughters for all I care; just let me sleep in peace.