Something a little dark in honor of Halloween. This is a guy who played in Milwaukee in July, and I didn't go to the show. I should have taken that opportunity, because his tour stops look like a KKK rally schedule - rarely jumping north of the Mason-Dixon line. Surprisingly, he also stomped through Europe for about 25 shows. Europeans love anything that smacks of the old frontier, Wild West image of the unrestrained, American cowboy.
Scott H. Biram is a pretty indescribable mofo from Austin, TX. To me, he sounds like what would happen if a guy who raped and murdered your grandmother picked up a guitar and poured the anger and deliriousness in his heart into a performance. Except better than that.
He calls himself a "dirty ol' one-man band." He sits with an old 1959 Gibson steel string guitar, amplified with plenty of distortion and bass, cranking out sloppy, bluesy riffs that could be John Lee Hooker or Black Sabbath, and then growls and howls frightening shit into the mic. I'm pretty sure what he is playing qualifies as rock music, but it really has a lot of obvious influence from country and blues with a deep hillbilly backbone.
He has cranked out about a half-dozen albums over the past decade and just works really hard playing shows on the road. Looking at his website, he's played over 100 shows in the past 12 months from Texas, Florida, Tennessee, the Carolinas, all the way up through the Midwest, into Canada, and all the way to Ireland, Italy, Germany, France, England, Belgium, Slovenia and Croatia. Living the dream.
I like a lot of different genres of music and love seeing all kinds of live music - pretty much everything but modern country. When it comes to a live act, I don't need to walk out thinking that it's my favorite band, or the best music ever. I don't even really need to like the music to appreciate the show. Really, I just want to walk out of a show knowing that I really saw something. "That was something" - literally, that's good enough for me to be satisfied that I got my money's worth. Scott H. Biram delivers, that much is clear. If he comes back to the area, I'm going to make an effort. I'm also going to watch my back among his fans.
Check the performance of "Blood, Sweat and Murder" below. It seems to be a love song to his woman about how she makes him so mad, but he could never hurt her, so he just kills some other woman to satisfy the demon. Say what you will, but you have to admit at the least, "I don't know that was, but it was something."
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