The Bottle Rockets – Bottle Rockets album review

While Bottle Rockets is one of those rare albums that I can (and usually do) listen to from beginning to end, there are some standout tracks like the Anti Neo-Rebel anthem “Wave That Flag” (that good old boy wavin’ the stars and bars/It’s a red, white and blue flag, but it ain’t ours). The album then moves into the melancholy “Kerosene” about a family that dies in a trailer fire by using gasoline in a kerosene heater, an all too common tragedy here in the southern Midwest. The up-tempo rockers “Rural Route” and “Manhattan Countryside” tell the story of small towns; their landscapes and residents being bought and flattened by land developers through lyrical imagery such as “I didn’t have to move to the big city/I stayed right in my country home/they built it all ‘round me”.

Showing musical influences from equal parts Neil Young, Waylon Jennings and ZZ Top and Lyrical influences from Woody Guthrie and Hank Williams Sr. If anyone today is worthy of the title “Hillbilly Shakespeare” it is the Bottle Rockets Lead Singer/Songwriter/Guitarist Brian Henneman. His ability to express the feelings of the everyman is the most pervasive on this album and most notably on the tracks “Gas Girl” a lighthearted uptempo song about the stalking of a gas attendant (tell you I stopped by for cigarettes and I don’t even smoke) and “Got What I Wanted” a more traditional country song lamenting about leaving a good relationship for the hopes of one that is more carefree, realizing at songs end that the bird in the hand is always better than two in the bush.

From the opening banjo of “Early In The Morning” to the closing wishful reminiscing of “Lonely Cowboy” this album reflects the simple times of life in the Midwest. This self-titled album by the “Survivors of the great roots rock scare of the mid 90’s” still holds up against the alt-country classics by the likes of Uncle Tupelo, Whiskeytown, Son Volt and early Wilco almost 20 years after its release and deserves a place in anyone’s collection between Uncle Tupelos No Depressionand Neil Young’s Harvest.