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Grant Peeples calls his music “Alternative Southern.” Though this is not a genre or sub-genre that one finds on song manifests, it fits this unique songwriter well. It is implicitly political, cultural and relevant.
These are songs about a South that wheezes in the shadows of ruinous real estate developments and suburban sprawl, and the steeple of the staid Episcopal Church. It is bad teeth, pit bulls and body odor, dirt under the fingernails, fast-food obesity, chain smokers, tattooed faces, shady county sheriffs. There are meth labs and racism and guns. A fearless guy on death row and a guy who ties his cheating girlfriend to the railroad tracks, only to console her with sips of whiskey as the train comes chugging around the bend. “This is real country,” explains one of these hard hitting songs. “Man, and it ain’t pretty.”
It is Flannery O’Conner set to music. Songs that almost gloat on the ugly underbelly of a class divided society, while sticking their collective tongue out at the lame sentimentality of today’s neo-country (a Peeples term) music. The sound is classic, sparse, twangy, and guitar driven, and cut from the same cloth that songwriters like Guy Clark, Lucinda Williams and Ray Wylie Hubbard knit their own tunes.
It’s all sung with Peeples’ commanding, seasoned voice. It’s a rough, edgy voice that works like a bucksaw on his recurrent themes of poverty, class struggle, hypocrisy and environmental ruin. From one song to the next, the mood shifts quickly from dark to comedic and back again. The dark is foreboding; the comedic is ironic, and always at the expense of one convention or another: church, state, the Executive branch, or the rural landscape from which Peeples himself hails.
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