At some point on your first run through Straight To Hell, it will hit you that you haven’t once heard a distorted guitar. The album is so punk-rock in attitude and execution, and the tempos are so headlong, that you are sure that at some point somebody plugged a Gibson into a cheap fuzz pedal. But that never actually happened. Instead, Williams’ band chases his rough whine of a voice with keening country fiddle, a driving tick-tack beat, plenty of tasty Martin and Telecaster guitars, and a nice helping of steel guitar and Dobro just like all those old country albums I grew up on. The playing is raucous but clean - as fiery and precise as anything I’ve heard that raise a storm without needing overdriven amplifiers.
Straight To Hell, starts off with about thirty seconds of a scratchy, plaintive country-gospel ballad called “Satan Is Real,” which quickly degenerates into basso-profundo laughter (presumably from the dark lord himself) as the band kick into the real album opener, a honky-tonk barnburner called “Straight to Hell.” That’s not just a name - it really is the theme of the album. Like Hank Williams Sr., Jerry Lee Lewis, and Little Richard before him, Hank III is one of those artists who sing about a life of pills, whiskey and madness but constantly lament that all this fun means they will burn forever in hell. This tension between gleeful dissipation and crushing depression is what gives Straight To Hell its kick. On the title songs, Williams tears into lines about “looking for trouble” with the same fury as he sings the chorus, “I’m going straight to hell, ain’t nothing slowing me down / I’m going straight to hell, so you just better get me one more round.” Meanwhile the band kick up an electrifying honky-tonk mess.

Since this is an old-school country record, and since Hank Williams III is maybe a tad too eager to take after his forebears, better than half of the songs on the album hoe this same row. “Pills I Took” is a wide-eyed story of destruction and mayhem, and it’s not perfectly clear whether Williams’ narrator (Williams?) is more proud or ashamed about the blood on the carpet and the broken mirrors. “Thrown Out of the Bar” gives a shout-out to country maverick David Alan Coe and is the first of about half a dozen songs on the album that take predictable but well deserved swipes at the neutered shiny ‘stars’ who pass for country music royalty today. But more than that, “Thrown Out of the Bar” is just another of ten or so excellent songs the joys and perils of excess. Whether the joys or the perils are the point, well, I guess that’s your call.

Williams seems to instinctively understand that this dance with the dark side it what gives a lot of the best country music its power. On the bleak “Country Heroes,” he takes the standard country song story about drinking with your elders to a creepy level, singing “sometimes I feel like I’m out of control… and I’m here getting wasted, just like my country heroes.” Considering that is grandfather drank himself into his grave at age 29 and George Jones, prominently namechecked in the song, has consumed tragic-heroic amounts of booze in his time, it’s a little unsettling that Hank III is so intent on getting plowed. Similarly, “Crazed Country Rebel” is about an interstate drink and drugs spree that doesn’t sound so much fun as frantic, as if he’s not doing whiskey, pot, ‘shrooms, and coke for fun, but because they just might finally kill him.

The thing that really sets Hank III apart from the pack is his anger. The same anger that gets him “thrown out of the bar” and high on “them pills I took,” or that he numbs down while “drinking with all my country heroes” also shows up as a fierce defense of traditional country against well-scrubbed newcomers and Yankees. He dedicates “Dick In Dixie” to the high purpose of putting

The dick in Dixie, and the cunt back in country
‘Cause the kind of country I hear nowaways is a bunch of fuckin’ shit to me.
They say I’m ill mannered, they say I’m gonna self-destruct
But if you know what I’m thinkin,’ you know that pop country really sucks.”

We are then invited to kiss his ass. As he states again and again, Williams can’t stand the new breed of country musicians “kissing ass on Music Row” who have replaced the “outlaws that had to stand their ground” and he can’t listen to country music in the same room as “some faggot looking over at me.”

There is even a takedown of Kid Rock (of all people) on “Not Everybody Likes Us.” Williams is deeply proud of his Southern heritage and his family and can’t stand it that a Yankee like Kid Rock is dabbling (poorly) in country and claiming a redneck background. I can grant him the fact that Kid Rock’s country experiments aren’t too great, but goddamnit, I’m a Yankee too, a country-raised briarhopper from Ohio, and my heritage is George and Johnny and Willie and Chet and Waylon. And if you don’t like that, well brother, you can kiss my ass too.

In a great book called High Lonesome: The American Culture Of Country Music Cecelia Tichi writes about how country music became popular in part because it served to re-invent a shared (if largely fictional) down-home shared heritage for an increasingly displaced rural population in the middle of the 20th century. Tichi argues that during the Great Migration of the 1930s, when it seemed like half the population of the grain belt washed up in California, songs like “The Old Folks Back Home” became a lingua franca that brought together migrants from Oklahoma and Alabama alike in a new culture that they could share, built from shared impressions of an ideal America they had left behind and that they still held out hope of returning to.

That is to say, a major job of country music has always been to tie listeners back to a more perfect, even idyllic past that they can share even if they have never even been to, say, Texas or Tennessee. Examples of this sub-genre might be the Carter Family’s “Clinch Mountain Home,” Dolly Parton’s “Tennessee Mountain Home,” Loretta Lynn’s “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” the standards “The Yellow Rose of Texas” and “Home on the Range,” and even newer songs like Alan Jackson’s “Chattahoochee.” In a way, Hank Williams III is the just end point of a long trend in outlaw country away from idyllic stories about church and simple folks in favor stories about toughness, hard living, and defiant integrity. Home is the bar and church is, well, where you go to meditate about the hell waiting for you.

Hank Williams III has a stronger claim than most to the actual roots of country music, and Straight To Hell amounts to a 13-song defense of a reconstructed outlaw country past. To make this claim eerily explicit, the album comes with a second disc that contains a 42-minute bonus track, a druggy medley that includes train sounds, pig snorts, other found sounds, and bits of performances including a recording by his grandfather’s. It is definitely self-indulgent, but that goes just as well for the whole album.

The sound of Hank Williams III wallowing in inherited misery makes for great listening. In fact, his self-indulgent tendencies give his new album a focus and power that any other set of new-old songs about drinking, drugging, and women would probably lack. Whether Hank Williams III’s preoccupation with his own legacy manifest as a rant against Yankee ‘faggots’ crowding up Music Row or a creeping (and slightly creepy) obsession with walking in the footsteps of his idols, it makes for seriously compelling music.

Straight To Hell is a fascinating and feckless record, raw and rambling and full of piss and whiskey. I’ve heard punk rockers go country before, but I’ve never heard real country, old school country music get punked up from within. Hank Williams III is country’s ragged edge, and it sounds like he’s trying to find a way to live there for good. Straight To Hell is not an easy album, and it’s not a perfect one, but it’ll do just fine.