Tied to The Wheel Reviews"Great guitar playing lives in every nook and cranny of this cool record ...
Kirchen goes ballistic on `Truckstop at the End of the World‘, and he whups
major hillbilly ass on `How Mountain Girls Can Love' - a searing bluegrass
number that showcases his blazing flat picking on acoustic and electric." "Kirchen ... one of the most reliable purveyors of rock & rolling, honky
tonking, Western Swinging, truck driving roots music, aka Dieselbilly, ...
who doesn't get older, just better, each album a shade more inventive than
the last." "Kirchen calls his music `dieselbilly' which aptly describes his liquid,
rumbling Telecaster twang ... Bill Kirchen doesn't offer revelations, just
pure pleasure; when you've been playing this kind of stuff as long and as
well as he has, you mostly just prove that you have nothing to prove." "Kirchen's new album, Tied To The Wheel, has an instant classic in
`Truckstop At the End of the World,' a kinda topical ditty he wrote with
ex-bandmate Commander Cody about how it's tricky for a trucker to keep on
schedule after World War III breaks out." "Helping truck country music out of the yawning pop abyss comes twang-core
guitarist and singer Bill Kirchen, late of Commander Cody and Nick Lowe. On
`Tied To The Wheel,' Kirchen musically chauffeurs a sonic semi of
honky-tonkin' yodelin' dieselbilly. Steered by a twangin, chicken-pickin'
guitar and crusty baritone, Kirchen drives his rhythmic rig through
Bakersfield, the Grand Ole Opry and Sun Studios, recalling Buck, Merle, Hank
Sr., Carl Perkins and Ernest Tubb. Offering several truck-drivin' songs, Kir
chen comes off as an an 18-wheel Walt Whitman, presenting the long-haul
trucker as last of the asphalt cowboys." "Lanky, bespectacled ... Bill Kirchen looks a lot more like the shy, slightly
absent-minded science teacher we all seem to have encountered somewhere along
the way in junior high, and his slow, deep, folksy voice certainly doesn't
suggest the presence of a country-rock legend, a certified Guitar God, but
for more than 30 years now Kirchen has been as much an icon in his music - he
calls it `Dieselbilly' - as Clapton and Santana have been in theirs." "The best thing Kirchen has done since leaving Commander Cody. And it opens
with the weirdly prescient, laughing-just-to-keep-from-crying "Truck Stop at
the End of the World," the holocaust as seen from an 18-wheeler, which now
feels a hell of a lot less than entirely fictitious." |
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