That Hayseed Dixie have carved themselves a exceptional niche in music, performing bluegrass covers of classic rock tunes may seem a pitiful claim to posterity and hardly the stuff of genius but it works in the context of having a few too many beers, getting giddy and falling over. And having broadened their narrow set list of AC/DC and rock classic covers to include bluegrass takes on everyone from Outkast and Franz Ferdinand to Greenday they’ve done the impossible and transformed a commendable musical curio into a full blown novelty project. It’s still entertaining, of course, but there’s an element of forced labour creeping into the equation. The opening cover of Led Zeppplin’s ‘Black Dog’ starts confidently enough with the richly familiar guitar-lick spun out by duelling banjos, but it simply peters out without ever achieving orbit. More suited, however, are the earthy political poke and thrust of Black Sabbath’s ‘War Pigs’ and Greenday’s hollerin’ folksy, protest song ‘Holiday’. Better still is the band’s loco-charged rendition of Outkast’s ‘Roses’ – commendable not only the fiddly and tricksy ukulele fiddling but for the effortless way the boys approach the crude yet robust ‘street’ vernacular of the original.
Treacle thick irony aside, A Hot Piece of Grass is a vehicle for some excellent bluegrass music. What’s dissapointing is that these patently able musicians have to resort to some hardcore novelty tactics to get it heard.