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Way back in the '80s, Jon Langford and the Mekons were mining the common ground between Merle Haggard and the Clash - that is, between punk and country. Langford upped the ante in the '90s, when he left England and found a home in Chicago's insurgent country scene with the Waco Brothers, an outfit he helped turn into one of the world's roughest, noisiest all-star bar bands. "Electric Waco Chair" finds the group getting tighter without losing any of the rough edges that made it so appealing. The Waco Brothers swagger on every track, whether it's the sneering proletarian anthem "Walking on Hell's Roof Looking at the Flowers" or the waltzing country ballad "Never Real." Tracy Dear (on "World's Greatest Living Englishman") and Dean Schalbowske (on "Wreck") trade vocals with Langford, balancing his bombast with a bit of twang. Like the best country and punk, Waco's music carries a constant theme of the common man fighting for survival, all executed with a reckless abandon that makes "Electric Waco Chair" a highly infectious manifesto.
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