Distilled from primal street-slop into a potent brew of high-octane rock and roll, Skunkmello’s core unit of Matt Bartlett on the rippers, Ed Cuervo on the boomers, and Jono Ori on the bangers, (sonically supported by a platoon of convicts, marauders and ruffians too numerous and debaucherous to commit to paper) has been in the business of breaking things for some time now. And here, for your ears only, the band is debuting their next single, “The Wildcard”, along with the super rad b-cool side, “Heaven Sitting Down”, both off the recently finished full-length offering, Discount Liquors, set to inebriate audiences later this year.
The new record is a burning blend of bootlegged spirits shaken up to create a high-test cocktail of garage-folk, fuzz-country, sewer-blues and red-eyed rock and roll, all duct-taped together with lean determination and white-knuckled grit to defy the high costs of low living. It follows the band’s four critically acclaimed previous studio efforts, the 2016 milestone, Hot Chicken (available on vinyl from Moped Music), 2014’s Stars & Stripes, 2013’s Lowlife Dreams EP (mastered by Grammy Award-winner Brian Lucy, known for his work on The Black Keys’ Brothers and El Camino), and 2012’s raucous debut, The Whiskey & Oatmeal EP.
Irreverent and irredeemable, “The Wildcard” is a loud and wayward eulogy to the days of wine and roses and a clarion call to lay them raises down despite brutal odds and interminable bummers. For the pontoon-boat captain traversing the eye of the hurricane, it’s a fuzzy love letter to the cause of the renegade and the reckless, and a death-chant against those two-faced goons of respectability and decorum. And the b-cool side of “Heaven Sitting Down” is a heavy gutter-stomping revamp of the vintage country-blues classic, an aspirational meditation in the emergency of these strange times.
Skunkmello will be touring to support the new tunes and others to come off the new record throughout the next several months. Look for them out on the road burning across the interstates of asphalt Americana, peddling their tonic of rowdy rockers in surf stereo, blazed in big city lights.
