Shotgun CD reviews are short reviews on CDs that you can usually pick up for $10 or less. For further explanation, check the FAQ

Red Simpson - The Best of… (country): Red Simpson started his career writing songs for country greats like Buck Owens and Merle Haggard, but his career never really took off until he started recording truck driving music for Capitol in the late 60’s. Simpson never drove a truck, but he is the indisputable king of truck driving country music. There are 20 tracks on this album including “Nitro Express”, “Truck Drivin’ Man”, “Highway Patrol”, “Six Days On The Road”, and others that make me want to throw on a down vest and hop up behind the wheel of a big rig. 10-4? A

Scissorfight - Jaggernaut (stoner): The very first thing you hear on this disc is Scissorfight’s lead singer seemingly drunk and trying to play Frampton’s “Do You Feel Like We Do” on a Hammond organ. He stops and slurs,

“I’m going to fuck this song up right now with some shit. You’re gonna plug that little bitch in for me… I’m gonna make it… and new wave this fuckin’ song.”

Then, you get punched with a wall of guitars. That’s Scissorfight. They’re a rock/stoner outfit hailing from the bearded back woods of Cow Hampshire. The sound is six foot six inch bald biker with a beard type aggressive punctuated with the musical equivalent of fart jokes. When it’s on, it’s on, but the less serious elements consistently drag me out of the aggressive feel and keep me from getting fully immersed in the music. Even though it’s difficult for me to sit through the entire album, when one of the more aggressive tracks comes up randomly on my music player, I inevitably find myself rocking the hell out of it in a wide-legged, rock star stance. B-

Hank Williams III - Lovesick Broke and Driftin’ (country): I really liked one of Hank’s earlier albums, Risin’ Outlaw, and the sample clips from this one made it seem like it would be more of the same. Unfortunately, even though a clip can give you the overall feel of an album, they are never long enough to point out boring or downright poorly written lyrics. If I don’t pay attention while listening, I can make it through most of the disc because it has the musical and vocal sound of an old Hank Williams album, but if I give it any sort of scrutiny, the poor lyrics and sometimes slapped-together song structures get me annoyed pretty quickly. While I will concede that there are a couple of good tracks on the album, if I skip more songs than I listen to, I have to call the album a loser. D

Cameo - Gold (funk): When I picked up this dual disc set, the only thing that I knew about Cameo was that they had high top fades and sang “Word Up” back in the 80’s. I don’t typically buy discs for one song, but this one was so cheap that I figured if I only played “Word Up” a couple of times a year to make myself laugh, it would be worth the price of admission. When I gave it a listen, I found that Cameo is really a certified funk group that sits somewhere in between Earth, Wind, and Fire and Rick James. The first disc contains a number of familiar funk tracks that I had no idea were by Cameo, while the second disc is more of the 80’s synth Cameo that I was expecting. In both cases, the discs are a lot of fun. If you’re a geek, you should appreciate a track called “Funk Funk” which starts with a terrible Star Trek impersonation in which “Captain Smirk” orders a landing party to the planet’s surface with “phasers set to funk funk”. Should you pick this one up on the cheap? Word Up. B

Various - Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center 1961-1973 (experimental): I got the original version of this album at a flea market about 10 years ago for a dollar. When I bought it, I had no idea what it was, but out of the 1600+ records I lost when my house burned down, this was the only one that I actually missed. Since that time, I haven’t been able to find anything remotely like it until my dear parents happened to pick this album up for me. By normal standards, this isn’t music. It’s a collection of experimental tracks that were made in the 60’s and early 70’s by splicing together reel-to-reel tapes of sounds made by the original RCA Mark II Sound Synthesizer. I’ve seen this album turn several people’s moods from happy to visibly agitated in a very short time, so it is not for everyone. For the music junkie looking for something different to sink their brains into, it’s a treasure. Unfortunately, this album isn’t cheap, so your best bet will be to hope some flea market table jockey has no idea what they have and sells it to you cheap. A+

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