Customer Reviews

Rum and Rodeo

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Of the recent spate of best-of collections coming out on the HighTone label, few could be more welcome than this set looking back at the early work of West Coast honkytonker Heather Myles. A California native heavily under the spell of Buck and Merle, Myles hit the SoCal country scene in the wake of Dwight Yoakam's back-to-basics breakthroughs, and recorded two fine albums for Hightone, 1992's "Just Like Old Times" and "Untamed," in 1995. This disc features a baker's dozen of her best songs, along with a previously unreleased version of "Read You All Wrong," with plenty of good, old-fashioned hard-country shuffles and heartsongs that stand right up there with the best of the old stuff. There's also a bit of her more jangly '60s rock-tinged material, and a brief dip into roadhouse blues, but it's the hard country stuff that makes this disc worth the price of admission. Both of her original albums are also worth tracking down, but this best-of set sure does a good job boiling 'em down into one swell little package, sure to please the old-school country lover in us all.

Heather Myles sings country music in a classic way that takes me back to roadhouses, jukeboxes, pickled eggs, and neon-colored condoms for two quarters - she is that good - and her music is not stylistically derivative other than the genre itself. Hard to believe I was living in Uganda over a decade ago when I got my hands on "Too Much Rum and Rodeo" - on a homemade cassette tape compilation with no artists mentioned. Thirteen years later, I googled the title and finally found her. Damn, It was worth the wait! If you have only a few country artists for those days when the mood hits you and you pop a top at 10 AM and crank up the box, then Heather should be right in there with Dwight, Possum, Merle, and Randy. That says a lot.

If you like the traditional back to roots..country and western..clean instrument backing, no fancy techno effects, powerful vocal..this is one worth collecting.