Customer Reviews

Always Say Please & Thank You

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For ALL you folks out there who love tongue-in-cheek gospel-like vintage-style country-western music.. THIS is the album that meets your needs. The dark, rich music is sure to not disappoint. It encompasses the punk, the rockabilly, the hillbilly, the country-western, the Bible Belt Tent Revival. There are even aboriginal touches in places; something you won't quite expect, yet you'll welcome the ingenuity. Slim Cessna and his Autoclub are talented entertainers whose heart and antics perfectly accompany their musical magic. If you can't see these Amazing Healers of Faith live, then purchase this album and let Slim's music start a revival in your living room.

There is a peculiar sweetness to Slim Cessna's Auto Club. Beneath the yodeling and songs about Satan and Jesus, there is genuine heart and a wicked sort of cleverness. The songs pull you in, stick in your head, make their way into your shower, your car, your weekly staff meetings. You can't stop humming them. But they make you happy, make you think of truth, justice, and the American way, make you think of long ago times and the mythic Wild West.

Their style is oddly sunny gothic-alt-country with a helping of Bible-thumping tossed in for good measure. It brings to mind the late afternoon sun laced with cobwebs, filtering on the dusty planks of an old ghost town, where true love waits beneath the spire of an abandoned church. Yet there is nothing sad or slow about it. This is music that inspires spontaneous dancing. Whether it is a song about meeting Satan in a local dive bar ("Last Song About Satan") or a raunchy song about country-style lust ("Mother's Daughter"), the urge to tap your feet and sing along is almost irresistible.

It is also just plain fun.

Slim Cessna, Denver Colorado's favorite alt-country son, was back in '00 with a new band and a new record. One of last year's best releases, "Always Say Please And Thank You" is a twangy amalgam of hard-core honky tonk, old time religion, and wiseacre humor. On the disc, Slim's hillbilly tenor and blue yodel are backed by a fresh incarnation of the Auto Club, which manages to aquaint itself quite well to his unique vision. While the Club members are all better than adept on a variety of instuments -covering the gamut from steel guitar to steel drums(!)-they rarely take solos, instead submitting their considerable individual skills to a lean and mean group sound. Make no mistake, this is one driven unit. While much is made of the ironic humor that seems to lurk behind Slim's bible thumping, the album's best track may be the(relatively)straightforward "Jesus Christ," on which Slim voices the last thoughts of a dying man, who spends his final moments taking stock in his faith. More cockeyed standouts include "Last Goddamn Blue Yodel #7," which sounds like Jimmie Rodgers..., and "Pinebox," a demented uptempo number that could easily put The Squirrel Nut Zippers to shame. "Always Say Please And Thank You" stands as Slim Cessna'a best record to date, and is a must have for anyone interested in the weird fringes of contemporary roots music.

One day a Wilco fan said to me "Mermaid Ave.Vol 2 is the best disc of the year 2000, along with Always Say Please And Thank You by Slim Cessna's Auto Club". That assertion aside, I was intrigued enough to get hold of this disc by a group I'd never heard of. The fact that it was put out by Alternative Tentacles, Jello Biafra's label, seemed promising. Jeeeeeesus!! It's the best alt.country disc I've ever heard in my life! The essence of Uncle Tupelo, 16 Horsepower, The Clash, The Pogues, The Band, Hank Williams, Johnny Cash all combined - get the idea? This bunch set the Denver scene on fire, then the entire United States, and forged themselves a solid reputation as the best live band of recent years. Although they haven't officially broken up yet, the individual members of the band have kicked off their own individual projects on the side, most notably singer Slim Cessna, with the Blackstone Valley Sinners who have just recorded what is, according to Slim, 'the best Christmas album of all time'(Phil Spector better watch out!). Always Say Please And Thank You is the second SCAC album (group made up of Slim Cessna, Dwight Pentacost, Munly, Danny Pants, Ordy and Rumley), and makes use of a formidable mix of instruments - accordion, guitars, banjo, organ .... pass!, and creates a festive explosion, a pogo sabbat, the most insidiously subversive hymns of redemption you could get, and culminates with a gorgeous storm of yodelling. You've got to realise just how lovely the sound of this group is: Slim Cessna is a singer without equal, equipped with a metallic voice that chimes perfectly with the menacing sound of the guitars, whose echo still haunts the canyons and ghost towns. When he yodels it is stunning and with the support of the superb backing vocals of the band and the rising sounds of the organ, it is enough to bring a stream of screaming phantoms down from the sky. Beyond insipid country and western cliche, the deeper quality of this disc is its infectious satanic humour, its atmosphere of celebration, of escape, of nighttime and travel. It is so intense and profound, you'll feel like you've got a hangover after you've listened to it. Amongst the strongest moments on this magical disc, the hallucinogenic 'Goddam Blue Yodel # 7' must be mentioned (don't dance to this if you have a heart condition), also the live 'Unto The Day', which puts everything exceptional about this band centre stage (yodel crescendo at the end), and the jubilant 'Hold My Head' to finish; leaving the listener on a high. Nothing could be better as a signature for such a disc than the third track which lasts ten minutes with its endless swirling vocals. When you open this disc you feel as if you have opened a mythical phial of sulphur.

Best regards to a nice person who translated this review from French to English.

Slim Cessna plies the oddest brand of C & W I've ever heard. Odd even in the sense that he makes Kinky Friedman's Texas Jewboys sound like graduates of the Tabernacle choir. Slim's reedy, nasal whine, his hollers, yodels and confessional, lower register banter, sit perfectly within the brilliantly performed, C & W mode. It's a mode that only takes my interest in special circumstances. The much neglected & under-recorded Paul Siebel springs to mind. And here, it's the manic humour of Slim's delivery. Mainstream religious thoughts are rarely evoked in everyday speech, that aside from song, in Australia.(Which makes the sanctimony of G.W Bush's invoking of the Lord in his addresses to the nation, doubly ridiculous & insincere from this hemisphere). So much of Slim's ravings assume an intensity, an irreverance & irony that may not be his intention. Witnessing a live show would dispell these issues, but that's an improbalility for me. It wouldn't dispell the intoxicating music and the humour. Although an air of country carnival pervades the disc, there's a superficial resemblance to the, the Verve; possibly a silly point, like saying Willard Grant Conspiracy is like Nic Cave.

Top 10 Reasons to Buy this CD

10. The only group out there that makes you want to give in to your inner redneck. 9. Best yodeling for the bucks. 8. Their music will convince you this must be the end times -- and I mean that in a good way. 7. It'll make you want to take up smoking again. 6. Cause you'll never hear any other preacher's son with lyrics like this. ("So I said Lucifer you piece of **, I should kick your ** right where you sit, all the ** you put me through, my mother cries because of you.") 5. It'll give you an, um, unusual perspective on all that inter-marrying stuff down South. 4. It'll drain your brain trying to figure out if this band is bluegrass, country, punk...or if the whole thing is just to mess with you. 3. Because it's not your father's county music. 2. Cause the band sounds like they could really use the money. 1. It's so much fun it'll make you laugh out loud.

This CD was my first exposure to SCAC. I found them as the result of a search for bands in the same genre as 16 Horsepower, of whom I've been a big fan for years. There are certainly a lot of similarities between the two groups - 16 HP's music at its best is thick with hellfire and brimstone and drips from the ceiling like tar from a hot tin roof. SCAC, on the other hand, is a bit lighter and more upbeat, although I must admit that it's the darker, more ponderous and gothic songs on "Always Say Please and Thank You" that really grab me. I like every song on the album, but in particular, Cold Cold Eyes, Cheyenne, Unto the Day, and Hold My Head all really work for me. Slim Cessna has a great voice that is well suited to alternative country, with one slight caveat... my only critique is that I find his Johnny Cash voice a bit grating. Johnny had a naturally deep and sonorous voice that was easy to listen to - Slim has to work to get his voice to go that low, and it just doesn't sound as good. Fortunately he only uses the "Johnny Cash Voice" briefly in a few songs, so I can get past it.

For ALL you folks out there who love tongue-in-cheek gospel-like vintage-style country-western music.. THIS is the album that meets your needs. The dark, rich music is sure to not disappoint. It encompasses the punk, the rockabilly, the hillbilly, the country-western, the Bible Belt Tent Revival. There are even aboriginal touches in places; something you won't quite expect, yet you'll welcome the ingenuity. Slim Cessna and his Autoclub are talented entertainers whose heart and antics perfectly accompany their musical magic. If you can't see these Amazing Healers of Faith live, then purchase this album and let Slim's music start a revival in your living room.