Jesse & The Hogg Brothers

Not too heavy with the guitar melodies but certainly not stingy in terms of vocal harmonies and classless colloquialisms cowpunk fans will eat up on the spot, I think you could make an entire album around Jesse & The Hogg Brothers’ “Love Buckets” and be more than pleased with the end result. That said, there isn’t a thing I would change about the group’s new LP Get Hammered, currently out everywhere quality indie rock is sold and streamed in 2021, and if you’re of the cowpunk persuasion, its cornerstone songs like “Biker Ann,” “America” and “The Hammer” are going to hit the spot as no other material can. Not quite as guttural as other releases in this genre have traditionally been, Get Hammered is the one alternative country recording you have to hear before this year is over.
Instrumental brawn isn’t as big of a deal in this tracklist as you might be expecting if you’re a conventionalist when it comes to this kind of indie music; in fact, “Onion Ring,” “Black & Blue,” “Santa’s Got a Bag of Coal” and “We’re All in This Together” are supported more by their vocal and percussive components than they ever are the roar of the guitars (though the latter two have plenty of overdrive to push a riff out the door). Jesse & The Hogg Brothers aren’t a band that comes across to me as being all that interested in strutting and flashing swagger anymore; in Get Hammered, they’re putting so much more stock in the substance of their aesthetics than they are the cosmetics other artists would center every last element of their careers on.

The compositional strengths in “Hogg Tail Twist,” “Santa’s Got a Bag of Coal,” “Cream Gravy” and “Texas Hammer” exhibit the sonic and songwriting intellect of this group exquisitely well, but I don’t feel like the band is going out of their way to flaunt the technical aspects of their sound here, either. When it comes right down to it, I get the feeling this record was made as more of a live template than anything else, advertising to us the basic anti-complexities of a rip-roar bar band that wants to get back on the stage far more than they want to experiment in the studio. The fact everything came together as brilliantly as it did may well be coincidental, but considering the players we’re analyzing in this scenario, I highly doubt it.
If Get Hammered is a reflection of who Jesse & The Hogg Brothers are in 2021, they’re going to see both their fan base and that of the cowpunk genre getting even bigger in the weeks and months that lie ahead. Every song on this record could be a single for the group, and though their previous efforts haven’t held anything back about their artistry, I will say that I think this just sounds a bit more open-ended and freeform by comparison (and not in a way that should make old school listeners nervous about this crew’s new look). The bottom line? Get Hammered is a slam dunk and a half for cowpunk fans.

Chadwick Easton - MELODY MAKER Magazine

Can you tell us what being in the recording studio is like for you?

Jesse: It can be stressful when you are trying to do too much but for the most part, I enjoy the building process and having songs kind of have a life of their own. Working with Alex Allinson @ The Bridge Sound and Stage in Cambridge MA, since 2014, it kind of feels like an apartment I never sleep at.

Pappy: Really, well nobody cares, Next Question!!

Okay, this a fun question. When you are not doing music, what else do you enjoy doing?

Bloomer John: I love cars, especially VW's.

Kenny Hogg: Me too I got me my VW VAN ready for the holidays, and my Porsche is always ready for the ladies.

Stevie Joe: Bicycling, hiking and I an a huge fan of Worlds Largest Things like the Ball Of Paint I saw recently with Jesse. It was incredible, we painted the 27,573rd layer and the Oak Ridge Boys had visited there before us, as they signed had the wall there, just like we did.

Pappy: I like watching my tropical fish while eating pizza and beer.

Who do you admire most in the music scene today and why?

Jesse: The dictionary defines admire as : to respect and approve of someone or something. The hard part is the "and", however Dwight Yoakam fits well because he has played with old time greats like Buck Owens as well as today's stars.

Kenny: The guy who dates the most beautiful women.

Pappy: I agree.

Stevie Joe: I guess so
.
Bloomer John: Hank

Can you tell us what song you've written that is the most emotional and describe the meaning behind it? :

I wrote a Christmas Song for our 1st album called "Everybody Loves When It's Christmas" and there hopefully will never be another song that makes me cry like this one did. It is a song about mother dying on Christmas and how it ruins the holidays forever. While I still love Christmas and always will, it made me think of my mom when we recorded it and I just could not hold back. - Behind The Song

Punk rock’s influence over pop culture and all of western music grew exponentially in the 2000s, and this season it’s having a hand in giving country fans a bit of the attitude that they’ve missed in the genre for decades back via Get Hammered, the latest LP from Jesse & The Hogg Brothers. The self-proclaimed first family of Texas cowpunk is back in the spotlight this May with what could be their most diversely-appointed album to date in Get Hammered, and while it’s got all the trappings the group’s fans expect out of a Hogg Bros. LP, it feels a bit more accessible to the casual country listener than past releases have.
The pastoral parts to this album, found predominantly in “America,” “Love buckets,” “Onion Ring,” and “Black and Blue,” aren’t lost in the chaos of the other material in the tracklist, but instead feel a little more noticeable because of the juxtaposition here. I think there’s a lot to learn about a group of musicians through the contrast they’re willing to put onto a record, and if there’s any truth to this statement it gets a heck of a lot of evidential support from content like Get Hammered – an LP literally centered on the duality of its artists.

There’s no getting around the passion seeping through the play in “Texas Hammer”/“The Hammer,” “Cream Gravy,” and “We’re All in This Together,” and whether these songs were performed acoustically as opposed to electrically, I think they still would carry the same heavy tonal presence they do in this instance. That’s all compositional muscle coming from Jesse & The Hogg Brothers, and I would even go so far as to say that this is probably the most conservative flexing they could have done in a new record given what they’ve been known for in albums like White Trash Meth Lab.

Cutting instrumental corners wasn’t something this group ever considered when recording Get Hammered, and that’s clear listening to “Wait a Minute,” “Biker Ann,” and “She’s Done Gone to the Gittin’ Place” alone. The collective push these players create when they’re firing on all cylinders is left entirely intact and unaltered in the master mix, which invites both atonal noise and residual veracity where there would otherwise be nothing but unutilized space – or worse yet, synthetics. Jesse & The Hogg Brothers don’t have any room for that kind of B.S. in their music, and this is indisputable in their most recent studio offering.

AMAZON: https://www.amazon.com/Hammered-Explicit-Jesse-Hogg-Brothers/dp/B082YJHD15

There are a lot of exciting records out in alternative rock this year, but of the cowpunk LPs I’ve been spinning this spring, Get Hammered is far and away the most complete and the most enthralling. In all thirteen of these songs, Jesse & The Hogg Brothers go off like no other bands in their scene have in ages now, and although they’re going to have to work just as hard in the future to maintain their place in the underground hierarchy, this is confirmation that they haven’t lost their edge in the past year at all.

Mark Druery - INDIE SHARK

The status quo in pop has never welcomed experimentation with open arms, but for the true rough riders in music like Jesse & The Hogg Brothers, something as trite as the status quo has never really had an impact on the innovating they get behind. The band’s new cowpunk delight Get Hammered is a testament to their rebellious ways, and if you’ve yet to take a peek at what the thirteen-song tracklist has in store for listeners this year, I’d recommend you do so as soon as possible. Whether it’s the smoky distortion of “We’re All in This Together” or the punky patriotism of “America,” this is a record that is guaranteed to leave even seasoned audiophiles intrigued.

You can tell that Jesse & The Hogg Brothers aren’t experimenting in “Love Buckets” or “Texas Hammer” simply for the sake of fitting in with a swelling trend in indie country; if anything, they’re doing everything in their power to reject the limits of any trends inside of their compositional attack. Instead of putting everything on a country-style harmony in this material, they’re letting the attitude of the lyrics shape the core narrative of Get Hammered, which is a challenge that a lot of their peers would unquestionably shrink from.

These guitar tones are some of the more ominous of any to make their way onto a Hogg Bros. LP, but in songs like “Hogg Tail Twist” and lead single “Santa’s Got a Bag of Coal,” they’re so controlled that they’re never given the ability to drown out the other elements in the mix. Clarity matters even when you’re trying to employ components of atonal white noise into an otherwise typical harmony, and we’re reminded of this repeatedly in these tracks. If there were any critics accusing this group’s sound of being detail-free before Get Hammered, I think they’re going to be set straight here.

I think it’s rather obvious when listening to “Onion Ring,” “Cream Gravy,” the introductory “The Hammer” and “Wait a Minute” that there’s more to this group’s style than simply mashing together the edgier parts of punk and country in a single sound. The songwriting in these particular songs alludes to influences from folk, alternative Americana, and even western pop that haven’t yet received their due spotlight in Jesse & The Hogg Brothers’ discography, and in Get Hammered, they’re made to flourish in a way that left me really eager to hear what these player are going to produce next.
If you weren’t listening to Jesse & The Hogg Brothers before Get Hammered or hadn’t even heard of their music, this latest album presents the right combination of songs to make a fan out of you in just under forty minutes’ time. Though not the most stripped-down look you could create as a cowpunk outfit, this is a band that knows who they are and have perfected the kind of music they want to be known for, and if that isn’t something worth writing home about in 2021, I don’t know what is.

Michael Rand - MobAngeles

The ongoing evolution of alternative music has been spurred forth by the underground experimentalists before everyone else – and this especially includes the fusion players like those in Jesse & The Hogg Brothers, whose facilitation of a proper cowpunk revival has brought forth an exciting wave of players from Texas to Tennessee and beyond in the past ten years. The band’s new album Get Hammered takes elements of their previous works and combines them into a more country-specific sound I think a lot of critics are going to excitedly lose their minds over this season – and not for reasons a lot of listeners might be anticipating. In songs like “Hogg Tail Twist,” “Texas Hammer,” “Santa’s Got a Bag of Coal,” and “Cream Gravy,” Jesse & The Hogg Brothers essentially return the country music model to its roots, with their brash sound ironically having more in common with punk than the folkier half of Americana in contemporary times. This is an album made well outside the laws of any scene, and for music fans who have always argued that Johnny Cash was a punk well before there was a name for it, Get Hammered should be a particularly enrapturing piece to behold.
Melodicism isn’t totally lost in “We’re All in This Together” and “Love Buckets,” but instead merely finessed to suit the backdrop it’s being placed in front of. Poetically speaking, I think the real substance of Get Hammered touches on an angst too many are afraid to acknowledge in the country music establishment, which brings to mind the efforts a generation of Seattle grunge players engaged in to save rock n’ roll from itself back in the early 1990s. While I’m not suggesting that “Onion Ring,” “America,” and “Santa’s Got a Bag of Coal” are the essence of a fresh rebellion against Nashville’s bitter stagnation, they prove you can be country, be aggressive, and hate compositional excess all while turning up the volume and lending quarter to honky-tonk harmonies every now and again. It’s an awakening if you’ve been waiting for something American-made and powerfully riff-oriented when it needs to be, but more importantly, it’s going to put Jesse & The Hogg Brothers on a mainstream map for a lot of listeners this year.

There aren’t many as unspoiled by their successes in this game as Jesse & The Hogg Brothers are, and while they’re not stepping too far over the line to be considered dangerous outlaws, their style of songcraft is one that is bound to leave a lot of mundanity proponents up in arms. You don’t need to waste time with hype – this is an album that has way more bite than you’re going to expect, but for every venomous verse it offers, a bit of familiar country melodicism shadows the line. I’m impressed with Get Hammered and its creators every time I give it a listen, and while it’s not the first hit in their discography, I think it’s a bar-raising, new standard for Jesse & The Hogg Brothers without question.

Jodi Marxbury - Daily Pop News