from April 2, 2009 issue of All Access Magazine
http://www.allaccessmagazine.com/vol7/issue04/sound_bites_savory_nibbles.html
CD Reviews
By Rob Swick
Black Mountain Majesty ~ by: Day Of The Outlaw
Back in February we met the White Trash Cowboys from Texas, bringing a hick-hop edge to hard rock, and now, with Day Of The Outlaw’s Black Mountain Majesty, we get another heapin’ helpin’ from the molasses-..drippin’ fringes of American culture, where city meets country like monster trucks crashing on a dirt track. Day of the Outlaw is a down-and-dirty quartet that updates the fine heritage of Southern Rock – by way of Southern California! How fitting it is that a band with “outlaw” in their name starts the disk with “Truckin’ Country,” a track that could have been lifted from the good ol’ original Outlaws themselves, the guitar army from down in Tampa town, Florida – but this time the rockin’ comes with a “Parental Advisory” for lyrical content. Yep, these boys let you know where they stand from the git-go, when you hear how bent they're gonna get tonight, maybe on the same Night Train that Axl sang about back in his Appetite for Destruction days. And “Pickup” does a good job of pickin’ up the old-school country-rock vibration, might be inspired by Marshall Tucker or Molly Hatchett, laced with a dose of Bocephus yee-haw. (Noting that “Pickup” has more than one meaning, here’s to the memory of a certain sweet Valley girl named Debra Ann, who educated this reviewer on a frisky, risky nightspot interpretation of the term.) You wanna keep it real, get a taste of “Peckerwood Slim,” and meet one of the all-too-many not-..so-beautiful losers that litter the dens and pens of the postmodern badlands. It’s a snapshot of a marginal man who just never got a break, but ended up broken. And although Day of the Outlaw is now based in So-Cal, you get a reference to singer Stewart Eastham’s Nor-Cal upbringing in that song, which mentions meeting Slim in a Butte County jailhouse – and all the gritty hard-luck, hard-time references ring true, even when Stew sings elsewhere about being “Misunderstood...” Between guitarist Spurgeon Dunbar (and additionally-..credited guitarists A.J. Dia and Mark Agnesi), bassist Burke Ericson, and drummer Cosmo Jones, a boogie-based foundation is laid throughout the album that’s fleshed out by all the right pieces from session players: piano, steel guitar, harmonica, and a sweet-sounding lady named Leiana Miller singing backup. You can two-step on in to the honky-tonk, folks, for a “Crooked Tooth Smile,” a juke-joint ditty that lets you smell the sawdust, beer, and non-filter cigarettes, and you can figure that this low-bottom love-story is headed straight back to the bungalow. It might not be pretty, but man, do these guys paint a picture. And in “Master Disaster,” we can tell that Stew is himself a master of dialect and a cultural chameleon, ’cuz what kind of cowboy talks about listening to the Geto Boys before his band kicks into what might as well be an old Skynyrd jam?!? - getting’ cross-cultural wit’ it, yo! But in counterpoint to all the hard-case, in-your-face stances, Stewart and the band turn tender in “Lovely Demise,” a sweetly sad song that keeps the listener coming back, not only for the poignant message of true love turned terminal, but also for the heart-tugging fiddle and guitar work. Black Mountain Majesty is a disk that demonstrates Day Of The Outlaw to be a band whose day is now.