Many artists dug Velazquez and painted like Velazquez; Picasso dug Velazquez, painted like Velazquez, then painted like Picasso. Hardnheavy veterans Dez Fafara and DevilDriver ain't no Pablos, but they've seized their passion for outlaw country and wrought personalized metal out of it.
The task is tuff, because DD need to adapt their inspirations without making us wonder what's the damn point. And mostly they whip that monster. First they transform "Country Heroes," a straight cornpone number by Hank Williams III (who has set previous examples by thrashing metallic with Assjack and Superjoint) into an doublekick firefight driven by drummer Austin D'Amond. The trick is genre avoidance, which DD accomplish by layering a deep, almost psychedelic haze over the sick slide guitars of Mike Spreitzer and Neil Tiemann.
With producer Steve Evetts (Sepultura, Symphony X) ridin' the faders, DevilDriver pull off similar backflips again and again, building a consistent aesthetic along the way. Behind Farfara's unmodulated flamethrower vocals, Willie Nelson's whimsical "Whiskey River" plunges over a cliff to boil with drunken rage; George Jones' gentle weeper "If Drinking Don't Kill Me (Her Memory Will)" turns into a scream of psychotic desperation. Appropriately for our age of extremes, the twangy classic "Ghost Riders in the Sky" veers away from nightmare vision toward goreflick territory, and Dwight Yoakam's mournful "A Thousand Miles From Nowhere" is located not on some unmapped rural road, but in a spacecraft burning up in the corona of an intergalactic star. Once we could scrounge temporary solace from a bottle or a jukebox; now the media demons chase us down in the deepest corners of our cowering subconscious.
The formula breaks down only a couple of times: Johnny Paycheck's "I'm the Only Hell (Mama Ever Raised)" lacks the dynamism for a proper Hades dive, and Fafara's unhinged streetcorner ranting makes you doubt whether, as Hank Williams Jr. confidently insisted decades ago, "A Country Boy Can Survive" -- this sounds more like suicide-by-cop, but maybe that's the message.
DevilDriver keep you involved via substantial shifts in song style, plus subtle vocal variations from numerous enthusiastic guests including John Carter Cash, Lamb of God's Randy Blythe and even Fear's Lee Ving. But the main attraction is that lush soundscape (made for surround speakers), always shifting, always tossing up something dangerous and mysterious. Drown your sorrows in it.