Lee Bains III & The Glory Fires - There Is A Bomb in Gilead (Vinyl LP)

The musicians in LEE BAINS III & The GLORY FIRES sing with Southern accents, because they speak with Southern accents. They sing about places called Birmingham and Opelika, because they were born and raised in and around places called Birmingham and Opelika. They don’t wear Depression-era clothing, and they don’t sing about picking cotton, or honky-tonks, or tractors. This is not country music. Really, it’s city music. It’s Southern, but it’s not the kind sold on TV. As much Wilson Pickett as Fugazi, as much the Stooges as the Allman Brothers, Birmingham, Alabama’s Lee Bains III & The Glory Fires have brought rock’n'roll to bear on their own experience and their own place. On ‘THERE IS A BOMB IN GILEAD’ they deconstruct the music of the Deep South, strip it down and reassemble it, to make a righteous ruckus that sits at the vanguard of the vernacular. It’s fueled by a passion that somehow draws a crooked line between punk’s personal politics and down-home Protestant theology. In 2008, not long after Lee Bains hightailed it back home to Birmingham, Alabama, clutching his guitar and an English degree from NYU, he fell in with the Dexateens, a Tuscaloosa institution whose raggedy union of cock-eyed rebel pride and forward-thinking fury proved to be the perfect apprenticeship for a confused Southern boy, trying to figure out how the rock’n'roll of Lynyrd Skynyrd could sit alongside the haggard beauty of Big Star. After Bains had played with the band for a couple of years (300 shows), the Dexateens saw the writing on the wall and Bains found himself off the road, back in Birmingham, without a band. He also happened to find himself with a passel of powerful, earnest (and pretty damn catchy) songs. Casting his nets in central Alabama’s rock’n'roll clubs, Bains began to assemble the Glory Fires. Drummer Blake Williamson had lent his mean yet laid-back groove to Black Willis, Taylor Hollingsworth & Dan Sartain, while bass player Justin Colburn had used the chops he took from his childhood gospel music to buoy the fiery rock’n'roll of bands like Model Citizen and Arkadelphia. Affectionately dubbed "Young’un," Matt Wurtele had proven himself a veritable guitar badass in Tuscaloosa’s bars and house shows. So, chugging along with a fierce Muscle Shoals vibe, the Glory Fires brought a sense of urgency to Bains’s drawling, howling voice. After tracking some demos under the powerful guidance of Texas punk pioneer Tim Kerr (Big Boys) and a few months of shows, the Glory Fires traveled to Water Valley, Mississippi to record the tracks for their debut LP ‘There Is A Bomb In Gilead’ at Dial Back Sound with engineer Lynn Bridges (Jack Oblivian). The songs were mixed in Detroit, by Jim Diamond (The Dirtbombs). It is there — in that Mississippi grease and Detroit grit — that ‘There Is A Bomb In Gilead’ sits.

Tracks:

Aint no stranger, Centreville, Reba, Choctaw summer, Magic city stomp, Everything you took, RighteousRagged songs, The red red dirt of home, Roebuck parkway, Opelike, There is a bomb in Gilead.

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