A few days ago, while I was driving along a winding country road listening to Scott H. Biram's debut album, I saw a dead possum lying square across the double yellow line. That image has stayed with me, so that every time I hear The Dirty Old One Man Band, I think of roadkill: gnarled viscera, bloody fur, flattened body. Obviously, this isn't high praise by any means, but the point of the comparison isn't to suggest that Biram's music is disgusting or lifeless. In fact, it suffers from a surplus of personality as Biram constructs a hillbilly stage persona by borrowing from Jon Spencer, R.L. Burnside, Jack White, Southern Culture on the Skids, Yosemite Sam, Tom Waits, the Reverend Horton Heat, and David Alan Grier's cameos on that Dionne Farris album. No, the point of the dead possum comparison is this: like that particular type of roadkill, Biram's mock-blues songs are Southern kitsch, their musical elements deep-fried and trucker-capped to the point of caricature.
Biram recorded The Dirty Old One Man Band on the fly, mixing live tracks with studio recordings and improvising songs he's road-tested over years of touring. Despite the added handclaps and tambourines, his approach is loose and immediate. However, Biram's not nearly as funny or as clever as he seems to think he is, a deficiency that is underscored by the off-the-cuff approach and that makes the album more tedious than entertaining. On "Someday Baby" he voices both sides of a conversation between his feisty lady (who gets the typical effeminate falsetto treatment) and his loutish, late-coming-home self (who gets the final word-- "Shut up!" which he repeats like a comic lamely milking a catchphrase). It's not really all that funny or weird, not here and definitely not on "I See the Light/What's His Name?" or "Downtown Chicken" or any of the other times he does it.
The Dirty Old One Man Band blends a wide range of styles, from blues and rock to country and even a little bit of bluegrass now and then. Gospel and spirituals lie beyond his reach, but Biram proves a capable guitar player, generating forward-moving boogie-blues riffs and reveling in the cheap-amp distortion. The medley "Throw a Boogie/Black Betty/Just a Little Bit", recorded live at the Parlor in Austin, mixes up the songs as Biram's animated guitar threatens to wrestle free of his grip, and "Truck Driver" is a barreling stomp with extra horsepower from backing band the Weary Boys. Despite the artifice that precedes it, "Sweet Thing" even manages to be sweet, as Biram drops the act to write and sing a simple, direct country song, proving that there's a real person underneath the persona.
