Album Review: Bad Ingredients by Scott H. Biram

Scott Biram’s Something’s Wrong/Lost Forever was a powerful album of music ranging from field holler spiritual to stompin’ blues punk; abundantly well-written, and bearing that unmistakable Biram panache of gravel, blood and tears. A song like “Still, Drunk, Still Crazy, Still Blue” is exemplary. As an anthem, it is to a contemporary underground garage, blues, alt-country crowd what Paul Simon’s otherwise praiseworthy G-rated effort of a similar title was to the Big Chill generation.

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Plenty of modern country singers like Eric Church and Jason Aldean talk a pretty loud “outlaw” game, but none of them actually let their music do that talking the way Scott H. Biram does. A one-man band whose music is steeped in acoustic blues, vintage country, and punk, Biram is a fearless singer-songwriter who creates a ragged, blustery wall of sound from just a mic, a ‘59 hollow-body Gibson, and a stomp board.

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"Scott H. Biram is a one-man band," and Biram is adamant enough about it that he posts that statement not once but twice on the cover of his fourth album for Bloodshot, Bad Ingredients. The slogan fits this music -- there are large portions of Bad Ingredients where Biram sounds like he's truly alone in this world, sitting in a room with his voice, his guitar, and a head full of mean thoughts about bad luck, bad women, and a future that seems cloudy at best.

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Contrary to both the back cover and liner notes to eighth full-length Bad Ingredients, Scott H. Biram isn't just a one-man band. He's the one-man band, a CB radio poet cultivating his own genre – Lo-Fi Mojo – for the past decade. Bad Ingredients mines the best of Biram's previous two Bloodshot platters, including the midnight ramble of 2006's Graveyard Shift ("Broke Ass") and its bruised hangover Something's Wrong/Lost Forever three years later (Delta-deep lament "Just Another River"), but there's far more at work here.

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