Rockbites: Ass Ponys return with Lohio

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Ass Ponys return with Lohio
23 July 2001

On their stunning new album Lohio (released mid June), Cincinnati country rock quartet Ass Ponys manifest a sort of raw musical integrity and coherence that comes only from bands who just don’t know how good they are. Not that they haven’t gotten enough positive press to swell their heads to bursting. They apparently just don’t believe it.
    Take U2. A truly great band, yet a thick glop of self consciousness overlays and mars their work, distorting its musicality. They know how good they are, and it wrecks them. (Buy their albums anyway: Bono does good with his work for third world debt relief.)
    It seems there’s a universal human failing to play the star to the detriment of your performance. But somehow, despite a dozen years of going for it, and getting it, the guys in Ass Ponys have cleanly dodged that bullet and stayed focused on making songs.
    Don’t get me wrong. I think most country music sucks. That’s why when something like Lohio comes along and twists my head around I want to figure out why.
    Ass Ponys are country the way Neil Young, The Rolling Stones, or The Dandy Warhols can be country. They use some rural imagery and some Appalachian musical motifs and instrumentation. But there’s an urban, high culture savvy flowing in a quiet undercurrent throughout Lohio, never getting in the way but very reassuring to folks like us who connect country music with rednecks, biggotry, and lowbrow assholes in general.
    (OK, so I suppose that’s my bigotry. Guilty as charged. Just want to be honest about where I’m coming from.)
    Tracks on the new album, which follows their very successful 2000 release Some Stupid With A Flare Gun, are Last Night It Snowed, Kung Fu Reference, Donald Sutherland, Black Dot, Dried Up, Only, Fire In The Hole, (Baby) I Love You (Baby), Calendar Days, Baby In A Jar, Dollar A Day, Butterfly, Nothing Starts Today, and a bonus snippet of an alternate take of Baby In A Jar.
    Front man, songwriter, and band founder Chuck Cleaver wrote about the new album—which the band recorded over a span of six days in Nashville last fall—“I believe I speak for all parties concerned when saying that the result is the closest to right that we’ve ever been. Damned if it isn’t.”
    Here, here! We’re pleased to give Lohio four bites out of five.

Rockbites ratings  5: life changing, 4: stunning, 3: captivating, 2: amusing, 1: annoying.

| Ass Ponys | | Ass Ponys on Checkered Past Records | | Baby I Love You Baby (live, full length MP3) | | MP3 page on Checkered Past | | discography | | CD | | top of page |

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