by Joe Buffaloe
Daily Lobo
With so many choices for concerts on Saturday night, any band entering Albuquerque faced stiff competition.
Still, enough people passed on Fall Crawl and Willie Nelson to fill the Outpost Performance Space on Yale Boulevard for the Asylum Street Spankers, a six-piece band of filthy-mouthed country-blues revivalists from Austin, Texas.
Though the Spankers are mostly in their late 20s and early 30s, the crowd was generally older. Except for a few children dragged along by their parents, I was by far the youngest one there. Their music, however, caters to all.
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Once referred to as a hipster hillbilly group, the band is innocent enough to write a children's album and a Christmas album, yet they are dirty enough to write an entire album, titled "Spanker Madness," about smoking pot in the country. By the way, I would have never predicted any band that wrote a children's album to down so many beers during one set.
The Spankers feature a variety of acoustic instruments and the occasional washboard or saw. The band's roots are good old-fashioned Texas bar music and swing-era honky-tonk, with musicians from every conceivable background. Guitarist Nevada Newman is classically trained, while vocalist Christina Marrs has learned four instruments since the band started. Founding member Wammo is a legendary slam poet in the Austin area, having worked as a DJ as well. The band's talents combine to form a bombastic, freewheeling style where anything goes.
The Spankers spin country-blues yarns full of subversive wit, whether about cookouts, lying about herpes or waking and baking. They sound like a pleasant throwback to the golden age of Texan music - only louder, crazier, more talented and fun. They take seemingly innocent music forms and pair them with degenerate messages and serious solos.
The concert included a number of cover songs, mostly from the 1920s and 1930s, wrapped in a beer-and-marijuana scented layer of sarcasm. When they sang "It's a Sin to Tell a Lie," it sounded like the singer would kill her boyfriend if he cheated on her. With their level of pure talent, they can't help but be good. But the drunken humor and wit are what make the Asylum Street Spankers special.
It was a sit-down concert, complete with programs that asked audience members to refrain from conversation during songs. Nonetheless, the concert didn't suffer. It was easy to understand the lyrics and focus on the music. After years of standing at concerts getting stiff knees and fighting off idiotic moshers, I was glad to be in a chair surrounded by sane people not allowed to become distractions.
In terms of pure country fun, their concert probably beat Willie Nelson, if only because of the space. Old-fashioned music like this is better suited to the Outpost than the Journal Pavilion. And though Nelson is a living legend, the Asylum Street Spankers represent an exciting, young underground force that deserves to win more followers. You won't want to miss them the next time around.
