Heavy Trash: Midnight Soul Serenade CD review (Shockhound)

For someone with multiple irons in multiple fires, Jon Spencer usually manages to make every project he’s involved with sound like…well, a Jon Spencer project. Heavy Trash, however, has proven the exception to the rule. The duo of Spencer and guitarist Matt Verta-Ray (Madder Rose, Speedball Baby) has managed to forge a pretty distinct sound that’s far more dependent upon Verta-Ray’s gelatinous guitar chords than it is on Spencer’s sweaty mic-hugging. On their third album, MIDNIGHT SOUL SERENADE, Spencer and Verta-Ray continue to embrace an upended and updated take on rockabilly, squeezing the honky-tonk, jump-blues and swamp juice out of the dead-horse genre in a way that’s both exciting and breathlessly engaging. There’s no archaeological studiousness here, yet neither is there any of the Blues Explosion’s fiery inversion of the root sound. Instead, MIDNIGHT SOUL SERENADE glides along naturally, tossing off reverb-soaked haunts (“Bedevilment”), jaunty barn-burners (“Bumble Bee”) and swinging, twangy soul (“That’s What Your Love Gets”) with an easy and infectious aplomb.

First appeared Oct. 26, 2009 at Shockhound.com.