Rico Bell & The Snake Handlers: Dark Side Of The Mersey

Although The Mekons began as a sort of arty punk collective, the cultish Leeds group began to find more success with 1985's country-tinged Fear And Whiskey. Reviving Hank Williams and Gram Parsons before such hee-haw appropriation became cool, The Mekons in its own way helped bring about the current neo-country explosion. Rico Bell, nee Eric Bellis, became a member of The Mekons right around the group's transformation from punk to twang, and his high voice and accordion were put to good use on such albums as The Edge Of The World. It took a while for Bell to get around to recording a solo album, but 1996's Return Of Rico Bell, a mix of vibrant originals and covers, was worth the wait. His second album, Dark Side Of The Mersey, is even better. With a new band backing him up, Bell lays into one great roots-rocker after another. "Cold Comfort" and "Hear The Sirens Call" recall both the rough-edged passion of England's pub-rock movement and its more crowd-pleasing American equivalent as practiced by such blue-collar poets as Bruce Springsteen. The music similarly melds folk, rock, blues, and country into anthemic nuggets suited equally to line-dancing and driving. It helps that the relative familiarity of Bell's music serves as an excellent platform for his lyrics, which deliver an equal mixture of the personal, provincial, and profound.