04.08.11 | Pete's Monkey Bar
There's a time and place for kick-ass country music, and Pete's Monkey Bar was the place to hear it last night.
Hellbound Glory's Friday show was far more country than expected, but it was a fine surprise. It's been a while since I've been in the presence of such rad and talented fellas. Upon taking the stage, they took requests from some hammered chicks who clearly had a thing for Merle Haggard and performed all the songs with just a little more edge than Hank Williams would have, but hey, when you're singing songs called "Either Way We're Fucked" and "Too Broke to Overdose," you gotta rock it a little raw.
To top it off, Hellbound Glory has perfected the art of looking cool and wooing their audience with drug-laced tales of losing women, drinking too much, and beating the shit out of Marines with their banjos. Seriously. While on a smoke break they regaled us with a story of how they got jumped by jarheads in Florida and had to fight them off with whatever they had handy. (The only thing left of the banjo was the neck.)The band assured us that the music would've been far more complex had they not been necessarily banjo-less, but despite the lack of twang it would've provided Hellbound Glory rockabillied it out. Men were dancing, women were swooning, and the washboard-playing, country-wailing, hard-driving drunken debauchery lit up Pete's like a PBR can in headlights.
