Gibson Bros. – Pulse: Upstarts – Rumblings From the Underground: Gibson Bros. – Blue Light Special Blues [300 Words] (PRESS, US)

What we’re playing is our version of the blues; it’s not really meant to be ironic or tongue-in-cheek,” says Gibson Brother Jeff Evans. “It’s just that it’s 1990, and there’s certain things that have influenced our lives – Kennedy and Vietnam and drugs and punk rock – and you can’t pretend all that stuff never happened.”

On earlier releases – Big Pine Boogie, Dedicated Fool and the cassette-only Build a Raft – the Columbus, Ohio-spawned Gibson Bros. mixed obscure blues and hillbilly covers with like-minded originals to create start, clattering white-trash Americana that bypasses mere stylistic tribute and cuts right to the fatalistic-but-fun heart of the music that inspired them.

Though the band’s original four-piece line-up has since splintered, a relative deluge of Gibson Bros. product has hit recently, including the recent Punk Rock Truck Driving Son of a Gun (Homestead), a collaboration with Hoboken power-duo the Workdogs; the new Gibson Bros. effort, The Man Who Loved Couch Dancing (Homestead), which whittles the onetime quartet down to Evans and fellow singer/guitarist Don Howland; and scattered non-LP singles on various labels.

Son of a Gun – the swan song of departed Bros. Dan Dow (guitar) and Ellen Hoover (drums) – was, says Evans, “just an excuse to take some of the songs that we’ve been playing for five years and get them on a record. We recorded it in a couple of weeks. I hope somebody digs it, but it was really just for our own amusement.

“If anything, the best way to capture the Gibson Bros. on record is: the simpler the better,” says Evans. “I don’t think that getting a producer and a budget would help us make better records – unless we rented a big studio and hired horn players and then got some retarded kid to produce it.”

– Harold DeMuir”