F
ans of the Reverend Horton Heat haven’t exactly been flooded with new music from the band lately.
After cranking out eight studio albums over the first 13 years of a recording career that began with the 1990 release Smoke ‘em If You Got ‘em, the group’s most recent album, Rev, marks only the second studio release from the Dallas-based group since 2004’s Revival.
But frontman Jim “The Reverend” Heath figures people haven’t been bothered by the reduced musical output.
“When we were coming out with albums every two years, it really kind of pissed off our fans,” Heath says. “It was just too much, too much coming at them. And it always worked out that about every time we released a new album, that was right at the exact same time [fans] were finally starting to get and request the songs from the previous album.”
“After Revival it was like, ‘We better slow down on this,’ ” he adds. “And there were some other life issues that happened all in that time and it just kind of made sense to hold off on new albums for awhile.”
In a sense, though, it’s been even longer since fans have gotten a fresh batch of prototypical Reverend Horton Heat songs. The group’s previous album, 2009’s Laughin’ & Cryin’ with the Reverend Horton Heat, was a departure from the group’s signature high octane Roots/Rockabilly sound, as it spotlighted the group’s Country influences.
“Going back to the Laughin’ & Cryin’, I really wanted to make a straight Country album,” Heath says. “Every album that we’ve ever had has had a Country song on it, and [Rev] kind of does, too. But [Laughin’ & Cryin’] was fun to do. It didn’t turn out to be a straight Country album necessarily, but it leans very much Country.”
Heath admits that Laughin’ & Cryin’ didn’t register with some of the group’s fans. Having scratched the Country itch, it became apparent that a return to the familiar rocking sound would be the next move.
“It kind of seemed like we haven’t had an album that had some good fast Rock tunes since Revival,” Heath says. “So it just made sense that we would get to some more harder-edged, fast tempo, rocking stuff.”
And that’s just what the Rev album delivers. As is usually the case with Reverend Horton Heat albums, Rockabilly-rooted songs figure prominently in the mix.
A healthy dose of Surf Rock gets mixed with a cheesy horror motif on the largely instrumental tune, “Zombie Dumb.” On “Never Gonna Stop It” and “Let Me Teach You How To Eat,” the Reverend Horton Heat puts more of a punkish accent on its otherwise early Rock-influenced sound. The Country influence, meanwhile, pops up on “Hardscrabble Woman” and “Longest Gonest Man,” although the latter tune in particular is as frisky as about any song on the album.
If the sound and style of Rev will feel familiar to fans, one thing that was different was the recording process itself. Many of the group’s 10 previous albums were recorded quickly — sometimes over the span of just a few days.
But singer/guitarist Heath and his bandmates, bassist Jimbo Wallace and drummer Scott Churilla, took their time in making Rev. The group put together its own recording studio/rehearsal space. This brought a new level of freedom to the recording process.
With its own studio, The Reverend Horton Heat didn’t get locked into a single recording session with a tight deadline. And Heath says the trio took full advantage of being able to play the new songs on the road, see how they developed and then revisit them in the studio.
“There are several songs on this that we scrapped completely, [sometimes] four versions of the songs before we finally hit it on the fifth version,” he says. “So we’d be working and tweaking and doing all of this, and then go ‘Nah, let’s just trash it and start over.’ So having the flexibility to do that, that’s really, really awesome.”
The group is back on the road, playing shows in support of Rev (which by the way, is the group’s first release under a new deal with Victory Records). But that doesn’t mean fans will be inundated with new tunes during The Reverend Horton Heat’s live set.
“We’ll be playing new songs off of the new album,” Heath says. “But gosh, it gets harder and harder; the more albums you come out with, the harder it is to get the new stuff in. People pay their ticket price for the live show to hear a lot of our standard stuff. But we’re definitely going to try [to include new songs]. We’ve got three or four of them that work really well live. So there’s going to be at least four. Probably what we’ll have to do is we’ll have to alternate them on different nights.”
What fans won’t hear during the live show is much in the way of ballads — no surprise for a group known for one of the most energetic shows of any band. Still, Heath says the group has calmed down a bit in a few ways over nearly 25 years of touring.
“We still play a lot of fast, high-energy songs,” he says. “Our slow songs don’t usually make the set. We’re usually going, pile-driving from one fast song into another to keep the crowd energetic and going. That’s kind of what we do.
“That being said, it has changed. In the early years, around the time when Jimbo first joined the band [in 1989], we would always do a bunch of crazy stuff. I mean, we were climbing up on scaffolding, on top of speaker boxes, jumping off into the crowd. We were walking on the bar and jumping off it, always jumping and falling and hurting ourselves. We don’t do that kind of zaniness anymore, but we still have our general zaniness.” ©
REVEREND HORTON HEAT plays Southgate House Revival Sunday. Tickets/more info: southgatehouse.com.
This article appears in Jan 28 – Feb 3, 2015.