Smashing Pumpkins as a mariachi two-step: Very Old Morris’s sincere send-up of ’90s country

There is a generation of musicians who grew up with nineties country radio playing in the truck and indie rock in their headphones, and sooner or later one of them was going to try to square the two out loud. Jerid Reed Morris, the San Antonio songwriter best known for fronting The Texases, has done it under a name that already winks at the joke: Very Old Morris. His solo record Boogedy Boogedy Boogedy Shoop is a love letter to the era of Garth, George and Alan, written by someone who can’t quite keep a straight face and doesn’t always want to.

The players around him include members of Rose Windows, the psychedelic band that once recorded for Sub Pop, and you can hear where they come from. Tracked at Jett Bass Studios in Windcrest, Texas, the album sets pedal steel and fiddle against loud guitars, then drops in mariachis where you least expect them. Morris keeps his own vocals lean; on several songs Jordan Bryant’s softer voice joins his, and the rest of the band piles on harmonies until the twang blurs into something closer to fuzz rock. Magnet called the result “vaguely hallucinatory,” and the press campaign has happily adopted the phrase.

The two covers show the record’s reference points. Iron & Wine and Calexico’s “Sixteen, Maybe Less” becomes a haunted his-and-hers duet with Bryant. The Smashing Pumpkins’ “Thirty-Three”, the soft ballad from Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, comes back as a banjo-driven two-stepper that ends with a mariachi flourish. It is the kind of move that could be a gimmick, and somehow plays as a tribute instead.

Recommended Reading92NY presents the New York premiere of COTTON: Denyce Graves, mezzo-soprano and Justin Austin, baritone

Still, the eight originals carry the weight. Opener “Howdy Arabia” is a surreal Western populated by Tesla bros striking crucifixion poses while twin fiddles mourn the Yellow Rose. “That’s No Way To Act” pokes at modern masculinity through truck nuts and Gin Blossoms jangle, knocking George Strait’s “You Look So Good in Love” sideways. “Ladies’ Darts Night” drags the listener through a basement bar at last call; when Magnet premiered its video, directed by band member Nils Petersen, Morris described it as one of those “hazy, chimerical nights spent simultaneously living and dying.” Closer “Long Oval” drops the jokes altogether for a father-and-son reckoning about inheritance and forgiveness.

That swing between deadpan absurdity and real heartbreak is what keeps the album from being simple nostalgia. In the announcement, Big Hassle Media pitches it as a sincere send-up of the greatest decade in country music, made by an artist who is “just old enough to desecrate it properly.” It is a fair summary of a record that clearly loves its source material too much to leave it alone.

Boogedy Boogedy Boogedy Shoop came out on October 2 and is available now on the major streaming services and on Bandcamp. According to Magnet, Very Old Morris is releasing it independently, without a label behind it.

Tags: Boogedy Boogedy Boogedy Shoop, country albums, Jerid Reed Morris, Rose Windows, The Smashing Pumpkins, The Texases

More Like This

Metro Boomin’s New Album “Heroes & Villains” #1 On The Billboard 200

BTS Turns Arirang Into a Global Homecoming Event

With ‘Métèque et mat,’ Akhenaton turned a slur into a French rap touchstone

“Come On Barbie, Let’s Go Party!” Aqua And Tiësto Team Up For First-Ever Remix Of “Barbie Girl”

Hanna Ögonsten: ‘Medicine’ – Out Now

Gary Lang’s ‘The Other Side of Me’ Constructs a Sonic Architecture of Displacement at the Sydney Opera House