The Cheater Slicks return with Ill-Fated Cusses out February 17

The Cheater Slicks are back after a lengthy lay-off with Ill-Fated Cusses. Check out the video for "Fear" below.

Here's the scoop...

Cheater Slicks, the take-no-prisoners Columbus, Ohio-based trio, return to Los Angeles’ In the Red Records with the thrilling, musically diverse Ill-Fated Cusses, their first album in eight years and their first package for the label in 20 years, due for release. You can get the album directly from In The Red right here.

The 10-track collection follows Piano Tunnels, a freewheeling, improvisation-based benefit collaboration on In the Red with vocalist Bill Gage, whom the band has known since the then newly-formed trio and the singer’s group BILL were working in the Boston area in 1987. Cheater Slicks’ history is intertwined with that of In the Red, the independent imprint founded by Larry Hardy in 1991. Their 1993 album Whiskey was the first full-length collection issued by the label, which began life with a series of 7-inch vinyl singles. That set was succeeded by the Jon Spencer-produced Don’t Like You (1995), the two-disc Forgive Thee (1998), Refried Dreams (1999), and Yer Last Record (2003). The company proved a simpatico HQ for the band’s brawny, high-wattage brand of wailing rock ’n’ roll.

Singer-guitarist Tom Shannon — who is joined in the trio by his guitarist brother David and drummer-vocalist Dana Hatch — says of the long relationship, “Larry and I go back to the beginning of his label. When I first had contact with Larry, he was like my long-lost brother — we had identical musical tastes. And he freaked out when he heard Cheater Slicks for the first time, because obviously here was a kindred spirit. It seems like the perfect home for us again.”

The renewed association with the label dates back years, to the sessions for the Gage/Slicks record, which ultimately was brought to In the Red. After an L.A. club date in the late ‘10s, the band and label decided to embark on a new project together. “It just took us a while to get around to it,” Shannon says.

Like every other band on the face of the planet, Cheater Slicks saw their plans to begin recording a new album derailed by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in the spring of 2020. Shannon recalls, “Things were getting shut down, and we were literally a week away from doing this, and weighing all the different things, we said, ‘Let’s not do this.’ So it got shelved. It sat for about five months. But my friend here in town, Will Foster, has worked with us. We had a recording history with him. He sent me an e-mail one day and said, ‘Hey, if you want to do this record, I’m willing to make it work one way or another. We can give it a shot and see what happens.’ And we started a process of trying to figure how we would record this record.”

He continues, “I don’t think of this as a pandemic record. I consider it something that made us think in a different way. Dana and I did the rhythm tracks together in a room, separated by plastic barriers. We recorded in various people’s basements in Columbus, mainly in Will’s basement. We wore masks, and we didn’t do vocals at that time. We could hear each other, and we could play the songs.

“The trickiest part was recording David, who likes to play with us live. He’s highly improvisational, and he likes to be familiar with the songs. He recorded in the basement of his house. Will would bring over recording equipment. They put together this very primitive set-up: The mix was blasting through a speaker, if you can imagine that, and David played to that. Somehow, and I don’t know how, the mic did not pick up that music being blasted through monitors while David was playing. It was pretty insane. He would do his rhythm parts and then he would do his overdubs, and he would do multiple takes. Then it was up to us, primarily Will, to sort it out in the mix, to get it to work. It was a lot different from how we would do it normally, but I think it worked out really well.”

Other players came into the mix. Foster is heard playing various keyboards and MIDI instrument emulations on the finished record. Most interestingly, James Arthur, of Fireworks and the In the Record band the Necessary Evils, was drafted to play bass, and he appears on every song on the album. Cheater Slicks had not deviated from the two-guitars-and-drums formula since its early days in Boston, when bassists Dina Pearlman, Allen “Alpo” Paulino of the Real Kids, and Merle Allin, brother of the notorious GG Allin, all rotated through the group. “James is very close to us stylistically,” Shannon says, “and has played shows with us many, many times. He really knows our music well. It was just a way to get a different sound. I liked it because it didn’t change our sound dynamics too much, but it brought that lower end and made a fuller sound, without changing the dynamic of what we’ve done as a band for so many years.”

After 35 years in business, it makes about as much sense to pigeonhole Cheater Slicks as simply a “garage-rock band” as it would to call the Rolling Stones a “blues band.” Ill-Fated Cusses, more than any other album in the group’s discography, explores a broad musical palette on its nine original songs and one cover, Memphis rockabilly icon Charlie Feathers’ stark barroom murder ballad “Cold Dark Night.” Drummer Hatch interprets the latter number, and penned and sings the hackle-raising album opener “Nude Intruder,” the comedic whine “Coming Back to Me,” and the rampaging “Flummoxed by the Snafu,” while Tom Shannon contributed the other six numbers. Shannon authored some of the most rip-roaring material on the record. He says of the blazing, melodically cyclical “Fear,” “I knew some people would think, ‘Oh, we’re in this period of fear,’ but it wasn’t written about that. I wrote it before the pandemic or any of the awful shit that’s happening right now. It wasn’t about Trump, either. It was about panic attacks — It was written about anxiety attacks that I have.” Watch the video for "Fear" below.

“Lichen” is among the most experimental numbers ever to appear on a Slicks album. Says Shannon, “The only things we’ve done that would be similar to that would be the free-form things we did with Bill Gage. For me, that was a kind of jumping-off point — I liked doing that on Bill’s record. Then I wrote this weird progression — it was this kind of stripped-down Link Wray kind of brooding, heavy guitar riff, and we layered things on top of it. It took on a life of its own. “I knew I was going to put this poem I had written on top of it, but I had never done it before. Quite honestly, I had never recited poetry before. I got into Will’s basement to do this vocal — we had already done all the instrumental part of it — and I did it in one take, and it just worked perfectly. When that happens, you’ve just gotta thank your lucky stars.”

At the other end of the spectrum is the album-closing “Far Away Distantly,” a decidedly pretty, yes, pretty song that is definitely the only tune in the Cheater Slicks oeuvre to ever draw inspiration from a Peter, Paul & Mary song. Sounding a little bemused about it himself, Shannon says,“I didn’t expect that song to come out like that. I was driving down to do the vocals on it, and on the radio I heard, of all songs, ‘Puff the Magic Dragon.’ And I thought, wow, that’s kind of a weird idea, to make into almost a campfire sing-along, because the lyrics are somewhat dark. And Will kept saying, ‘Do another vocal track, do another vocal track.”

In all, the latest chapter in the Cheater Slicks saga moves into bracing new territory without sacrificing the uncompromising blood ’n’ guts tactics that have long made them a formidable force in American rock ’n’ roll. “Songwriting-wise, I think Ill-Fated Cusses is one of the strongest records we’ve done,” says Shannon. “I don’t know how people will take it. It might be considered more refined by people who like the more primitive, brutal aspects of our music, but I think there’s a lot of that on there, too. I like to have the noise, but I like to have the song structures, too. I like the record a lot.” - Chris Morris, February 2023