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Concert reviews Music

Nashville Pussy lose their claws

Rating: NNNNN


O n the plus side, southern-fried scuzz rockers Nashville Pussy can now truly claim to have something in common with their white-trash forebears Lynyrd Skynyrd besides greasy licks and a molten sound so fat it has a beer belly of its own: they have some of the worst luck in rock and roll. On the downside, they no longer have bassist Corey Parks.

Exactly how does one replace a stacked, Amazonian, fire-breathing, chick-diggin’ bassist when she splits/is asked to leave the band? The short answer is they don’t, because they can’t.

Performers like Parks are one in a million, so while Nashville Pussy’s nasty roar remains intact, the sideshow theatrics that goosed their gigs — namely Parks’s pyrotechnics and her saucy tongue-twisting with similarly luscious guitarist Ruyter Suys — are, sadly, a thing of the past. Pity new bassist Tracy Almazan.

She’s a competent player, and, abetted by Suys, singer/guitarist Blaine Cartwright and drummer Jeremy Thompson, the former Helldorado member ably kicked the shit out of the Pussy repertoire with fire and fury. She even looks good in a cowboy hat.

But she’s a musician, not a towering circus freak who happens to play bass, so the quartet’s Warehouse gig — sandwiched between the unhinged Unband and headliners the Headstones — was, ultimately, a lunchbag letdown. A moment of silence, if you please….

Of course, there’s always a queue of others waiting to take up the torch, but don’t look to the caustic Unband. Completely straightforward in approach, the hard-living threesome proudly flew the flag for unadorned stoner metal — a point made obvious even to the thoroughly blunted in the house via a giant blow-up hand in full three-finger devil salute positioned at stage right.

The fact that they possess some of the dumbest-ever hoser-anthem lyrics underscored the fact that Unbanders Matt Pierce, Mike Ruffino and Eugene Ferrari aren’t about anything other than pure scorch, which, it turned out, was good enough.

NASHVILLE PUSSY, with the UNBAND,opening for the HEADSTONES, at the Warehouse, October 20. Tickets: $20. Attendance: 1,000. Rating: NNN

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