NEW ALBUMS
SCOTT HBIRAM
The One & Only Scott H Biram
AMERICANA
Album of the month
BLOODSHOT
8/10
Boisterous Texan in reassuringly rude health on 13th album
BIRAM has made acareer from his pugnacious take on beat-up blues, punk, bluegrass and outlaw country, barking out songs with an urgency that suggests every living moment counts.
“I view my albums as collages,” he explains. “They reflect the diverse aspects of life –it’s not aconcept but an expression.” There have been plenty of them too, from the early holler of 2000’s This Is Kingsbury? to the gnarly terrain of Graveyard Shift (2006) and, more recently, 2020’s Fever Dreams, on which he ran the full gamut of guitars, keyboards and shakers’n’bells percussion.
Nearly aquarter of acentury since his solo debut, Biram sounds no less immediate on The One &Only…. These are mainly portraits of people caught in the crosshairs of fate, at the mercy of isolation, bad luck and addiction. Bottlecaps tumble from the narrator of “Inside ABar”, acountry-blues set in acheerless dive on aparticularly slow night. It’s a Willie Nelson-ish ballad with a big, sad guitar solo, its narrator“feelin’ guilty for all the drinkin’/I just get so tired of being lonely as you are”. The song finds acounterpart in “High & Dry”. Again viewed from the vantage of adrunken stage performer, it bemoans alife spied from the bottom of acup, the world“kickin’ shit in your eye”. These may be standard country tropes –as are the troubled blues references that stalk “No Man’s Land” –but Biram renders them convincing through sheer force of will. Similarly, Lead Belly’s “Easy Rider” becomes atent revival celebration, drawing its goodtime vibe from handclaps, harmonica and massed voices.
There are highly emotive moments too. Informed by Trump’s Capitol riots, the fearsome “Sinner’s Dinner” rebukes “sore losers with weak little minds”, while conjuring aBiblical gale as either deliverance or damnation. The altogether more wistful “I’ll Still Miss Ruby” finds Biram on acoustic guitar, pitting childhood recollections against the roll of the years, ahymn to a time when there was still “forever left to go”.