Review: Fifth on the Floor, "Ashes & Angels"

Fifth on the Floor’s 2010 release Dark and Bloody Ground stands as one of the absolute best Southern rock albums of this generation. It rocked with rowdy party anthems, but also featured some very strong and soulful heartfelt songs.

Welcome to the follow-up, which could be described in very similar fashion.

The show gets started with “Whiskey,” a hell-raising party tune if ever there were one. The boys get the energy kicked up, and singer Justin Wells — one of the strengths of this outfit — belts out the lyrics in his best smoke and whiskey-laced drawl. The very next song changes things up a little bit. Guitarist Ryan “Matty” Rodgers offers up some very Lynyrd Skynyrd-like slide work on “Shotgun,” but the song itself is certainly not copycat. The tune swings with an almost jazzy feel as Wells sings about folks in a town where “ain’t nobody leaving, but dammit everybody’s hellbound.”

Review: "Southern Independents Vol. 1 and 2"

Over the past few months, Shooter Jennings has released two free compilations for his unfortunately named XXX movement, which are both still available for free download at http://www.givememyxxx.com/.

For those not familiar, Jennings hopes to create a genre called XXX to help promote some original artists, a commodity that doesn’t get much recognition in the mainstream these days. It’s an amalgam of musical styles, ranging from hardcore classic country, to Southern rock, to even some harder rock sounds. The qualifications to be part of the genre are a bit hard to describe, but it’s one of those things where you kind of know it when you hear it. The main points are that the musicians are doing their own thing on their own terms and no matter where the acts take the music, it’s all rooted in Southern and country tradition. The XXX moniker comes from the three x’s that appear on moonshine jugs in old cartoons and drawings. Obviously, that’s not what most people these days think of when they see XXX, which is a strike against the movement from the beginning.