The One & Only Scott H Biram
8/10 Boisterous Texan in reassuringly rude health on 13th album
BLOODSHOT
BIRAM has made a career from his pugnacious take on beat-up blues, punk, bluegrass and outlaw country, barking out songs with an urgency that suggests every living moment counts. “I view my albums as collages,” he explains. “They reect the diverse aspects of life – it’s not a concept but an expression.” There have been plenty of them too, from the early holler of 2000’s This Is Kingsbury? to the gnarly terrain of Graveyard Shi (2006) and, more recently, 2020’s Fever Dreams, on which he ran the full gamut of guitars, keyboards and shakers’n’bells percussion.
Nearly a quarter of a century since his solo debut, Biram sounds no less immediate on The One & Only…. These are mainly portraits of people caught in the crosshairs of fate, at the mercy of isolation, bad luck and addiction. Bottlecaps tumble from the narrator of “Inside A Bar”, a country-blues set in a cheerless dive on a particularly slow night. It’s a Willie Nelson-ish ballad with a big, sad guitar solo, its narrator “feelin’ guilty for all the drinkin’/i just get so tired of being lonely as you are”. The song nds a counterpart in “High & Dry”. Again viewed from the vantage of a drunken stage performer, it bemoans a life spied from the bottom of a cup, the world “kickin’ shit in your eye”. These may be standard country tropes – as are the troubled blues references that stalk “No Man’s Land” – but Biram renders them convincing through sheer force of will. Similarly, Lead Belly’s “Easy Rider” becomes a tent revival celebration, drawing its goodtime vibe from handclaps, harmonica and massed voices.
There are highly emotive moments too. Informed by Trump’s Capitol riots, the fearsome “Sinner’s Dinner” rebukes “sore losers with weak little minds”, while conjuring a Biblical gale as either deliverance or damnation. The altogether more wistful “I’ll Still Miss Ruby” nds Biram on acoustic guitar, pitting childhood recollections against the roll of the years, a hymn to a time when there was still “forever le to go”.