Yee F'in Haw!
Me First and the Gimme Gimmes - (Ghost) Riders in the Sky
You know that scene in Tommy Boy, where Chris Farley and David Spade are driving down the highway, flipping through the radio stations and when Superstar comes on they're both like, "Uhhh, This is lame, but I can live with it if you can." and then it cuts to them both singing and crying?
That's like every song on a Me First and the Gimme Gimmes album. They are the nicotine patch of really guilty pleasures. (and on Ruin Johnny's Bar Mitzvah they even cover Superstar itself!)
If you don't know who Me First and the Gimme Gimmes are (then you probably aren't a big punk fan), but anyway, they're punk-rock-kareoke gone horribly right, or wonderfully wrong. Made up of members of other well-known bands, they take songs from other genres and pound them out furiously (drunkenly) on electric guitars. The point is they're nothing but fun in every sense.
The first Me First and the Gimme Gimmes album just really struck a chord with me. The songs were great, the balance of sincerity and schtick was perfect, it just worked on a lot of levels taking the saccharine super sounds of the seventies and kicking them in the ass. I've had some fun with their subsequent albums, but Love Their Country is easily their best endeavor since the debut.
There's basically two kinds of songs on here, first there are the country songs that are really punk songs anyway (or at least remind you that country was punk before punk). Ghost Riders in the Sky featured here is one of those. And then there are the sugar-coated, soft-focus, 70's syrup country songs that turn into whole different animals. Personally, while I like them both, my favorites are the latter.
Songs like She Believes in Me (Kenny Rogers), Annie's Song (John Denver) they just rock the house with Spike singing because you can pretend to be all punk rock but at the same time their sappiness is just so strong it almost overpowers--almost, but they throw in enough yeahs and fucks to temper it.
And then at the end, boom, Sunday Morning Coming Down brings it all together. You don't get more badass than Johnny Cash and Kris Kristofferson, but they're also a lot of sadness in this song.
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