Countrypolitan Favorites is Southern Culture’s covers album, and the fun of covers albums is that they lay bare the bands’ roots, showing us the tunes they geek out for. Here the news comes in the form of T. Rex’s “Life’s a Gas” and the Kinks’ “Muswell Hillbillies,” even though the latter isn’t a big surprise considering the band’s trailer park chic aesthetic. Two John Fogerty tunes is a pleasant surprise, and both are good choices—“Tombstone Shadow” and “Fight Fire,” the latter from his garage band days in the Golliwogs.

 

Like most Southern Culture (for me), the band works best when it plays it straight. When Mary Huff sings Lynn Anderson’s “I Never Promised You a Rose Garden,” the band’s harder-edged version trims away the song’s treacle. On the other hand, Rick Miller’s tendency to ham up his vocals and play them for laughs suggests that the songs are fundamentally crummy, like guilty pleasures. Huff’s Swiss Miss yodeling in the background of their chugging version of Claude King’s “Wolverton Mountain” is so unexpected that it saves the song from another over-the-top vocal.

 

In the end, we’ve learned that the band has good taste (which we pretty much figured), and that it still rocks country, rockabilly and blues with garage band verve (which we pretty much knew) and that it’s still the act you’ve known for all these years (which we probably could have guessed).