The Peculiar Pretzelmen

If only Popular Music had taken a detour, that Rock had been the bastard love child of Woody Guthrie and Bessie Smith. Earnest balladeering bracketed amidst blood-boiling incantation, the electric smolder of a burned-up town, bones bleached in the desert sun. The Peculiar Pretzelmen have been touring this American sprawl continuously for over a decade, both familiar and strange as the tingling warmth when the 100 Proof settles in. Hollering, moaning songs of defiance and injury, with a plucking canjo and jangle of mandocello, salvage yard percussion pounding and the rattling of teeth in the neon glow of a cosmic exorcism.