Hey Negrita - Burn the Whole Place Down [Album]

Fat Fox

October 25, 2009, 10:45 PM

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If there’s such a thing as a special relationship between Britain and the US then this album may be the reason for it! What an astonishing, intelligent and accomplished album "Burn the Whole Place Down" truly is! Hey Negrita is wonderful; Londoners taking on the Yanks at country music and winning hands down! Fantastic!

This band and this album are the real deal; this is the music playing on the juke box in Midwestern bar rooms and Southern honkytonks, straight-talking, shoot from the hip, honest to goodness country. This is the music that young people dance to, couples make love to, and families live their lives to. This is the music celebrated in sequins and denim at the Grand Ole Opry and the Country Music Awards. It’s the music so many Americans aspire to create. Yet here’s a bunch of upstart Brits whippin’ their sorry butts and beating them at their own game! Makes me proud to be British!


Until Hey Negrita (named after a Rolling Stones track on the 1976 album "Let it Bleed") only Americans really ‘got’ the blues end of Americana. But now that’s changed. Hey Negrita has produced four albums since the band formed in London in 2002. Their fan base has grown steadily, they’ve already been on two tours of the US and played at SXSW but now the rawness and dynamism of "Burn the Whole Place Down" is causing the WORLD to take notice!

It’s an almost perfect country blues album, thoughtful, heartfelt and funny. Factor in catchy melodies, rousing and memorable choruses, great musicianship and a bunch of people who are clearly having a good time and you have a winning combination. I can’t quite get my head around the English accents when everything else would convince me they should be American, but once clear of that banana skin the scene is set for some of the finest country music you’ll hear on either side of the pond.


There’s not a poor song on the album, starting out with the title track, 'Burn the Whole Place Down', which with its tight guitar and vocals, featured upright bass, accordion and mouth organ sets the pace for the rest of an excellent collection. 'Rope' is a song Willie Nelson would have been pleased to pen, a ditty about a man who put wild into the Wild West and lives to regret it; 'Nine to Five' is another memorable cracker with a Monkees-style ‘wacky’ promotional video; while 'Room Service’s' mouth organ and chorus of ‘down, down, you can’t bring me round when I fall’, stirs memories of the young Bob Dylan.

'Here I Come' is about drug addition and 'Cold' about alcoholism, topics close to the heart of band members who have performed in prisons for RAPt, the Rehabilitation for Addicted Prisoners Trust. But for me the stand-out track is 'One Mississippi', very Creedence Clearwater, totally believable and instantly recognisable; they’re going to be singing, ‘running down the road apiece’ for the rest of their banding lives, which will be no bad thing coming as it does from such an outstanding piece of work.


"Burn the Whole Place Down" is a stunner of a country blues album with charm enough to build bridges from London to Nashville and provide 10-gallon hats and the obligatory sequins at the Country Music Awards. Plus a few beers. Hey Negrita – way to go!

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