*** DM Bob & the Deficits

BAD WITH WIMEN

(Crypt)

Louisiana expatriate Bob Tooke has a singular take on country music, spinning scratchy, low-fi honky-tonk out of strands as disparate as Hasil Adkins, Mexican folk, Cormac McCarthy, Jerry Lee Lewis, and T. Rex. Bad with Wimen is shitfaced, barroom-brawl country with a molotov-strength mean streak, sloppy and inbred, nearly remorseless. Nearly, because of their jilted, off-kilter weeper "Didn't Mean To Hurt Ye" (punch line: "Ah jes' meant to kill ye").

Tooke's shabby, bassless trio -- drums and guitars, with a smattering of rusty slide and crapola organ -- scrub the smirky sheen off hillbilly kitsch as purveyed by Southern Culture on the Skids. They reveal a music that's cracked, leering, and wholly menacing. That spirit is already explicit in Adkins's "Yard Sale" and Jerry Lee's "Breathless." But it's Tooke's rickety, piercing (possibly toothless) nasal drawl -- echoing like a ghost reaching vengefully back from the grave -- that haunts the tunes, a voice chasing the guitars into raw, punkish distemper and leaving the spare drumwork hanging in the air like a funeral march.

-- Carly Carioli