A Hillbilly Tribute to Mountain Love

On A Hillbilly Tribute to Mountain Love, Hayseed Dixie, the trio of hard-rock-loving bluegrassers who previously swore devotion to AC/DC, offer us a mountain-music version of the AOR radio format. Of course, there's something inherently, and deliberately, comical about covering the songs of Bad Company, Aerosmith, and Ted Nugent via surging banjo-driven arrangements and hyper-twangy harmonies--a point that becomes doubly obvious when these modern-day musical butchers contribute an original like "I'm Keeping Your Poop," a slice of lingering romantic spite so preposterous that the only reasonable response is to bust a gut laughing. But all this hilarity makes a couple of fairly serious points, too. First, most people have had enjoyable histories with many different genres of music, so why pretend otherwise? Second, anytime you re-imagine a familiar song, you focus attention, once again, on its lyrics. If the Hayseeds do anything here, it's to remind us just how horny and fun songs like Joan Jett's "I Love Rock & Roll," Queen's "Fat-Bottom Girls," and Spinal Tap's "Big Bottom" really are. --David Cantwell