Watch: REV. PAYTON’S BIG DAMN BAND Mama's Fried Potatoes' music video

Rev Payton’s Big Damn Band || Listen
Well, they’re not that big, but they make a damn big sound: featuring the burly, bearded Reverend Peyton on steel resonator guitar and guttural vocal bark – a sort of backwoods Brian Blessed – with his wife Breezy on washboard and his kid brother Jayme on drums, the band bring to their retro-fabricated rootsy Americana an utterly gripping compulsion.

Peyton employs a dervish blend of thrashed chords, bustling fingerpicking and slashing slide interjections, but it’s the post-modern manner of his material that really sets them apart.

Alongside food-themed cuts such as “Mama’s Fried Potatoes” and testaments to the rambling life like “Worn Out Shoe”, are songs which apply antique, vintage treatments to starkly modern concerns, corporate greed “Wal-Mart Killed The Country Store” to the health-insurance anxiety of “Can’t Pay The Bill”.

Even that time-honoured blues staple, the fishing song, gets a dystopian makeover in “The Creeks Are All Bad”, with Peyton advising anglers to throw back their catch “’cause there’s PCBs in the catfish, and mercury in the bass”. But there’s room for a glint of humour too, as in the trailer-park scenario sketched in “Your Cousin’s On Cops”. – The Independent