Wooden Leg

August 15 - 22, 1 9 9 6 [Off the Record]

*** Wooden Leg

WOODEN LEG

(East Side Digital)
Local singer, songwriter, and mandolinist Jimmy Ryan has vaulted from his most recent project -- urban assault bluegrass schizoids the Beacon Hillbillies -- into a lovechild of former Blood Oranges members. It's a stripped-down rock CD that recalls the Oranges and other roots-rock punks like Son Volt.
Granted, Ryan is not a born singer, and his disheveled lyrics are hard to make sense of; the only profundity to be found is on the traditional "Pretty Polly." But his sense of a contemporary sound is second to none. The Oranges and the Hillbillies, if nothing else, gave bluegrass a cool voice in the '90s. On Wooden Leg, light and fast anthems like "Nothing But Time" and "Hard Luck," studded by epileptic percussion and sweltering mandolin leads, are great stuff. The guts of the CD crystallize where Ryan's virtuoso mandolin and Mark Spencer's distortion-laden electric guitar push acoustigrass roots into heavy, punkier realms like "Pretty Polly" and the gloomy vignette "Out of My Yard," which features a languid Mark Sandman vocal.
-- Marc Levy