Expand Your Music Library Without Money, Theft or Effort: Woozy Viper

The morning after a party is predictable. Your head is splitting and your tongue is stuck to the roof of your mouth. Your clothes and dignity are places unknown. There is at least one thing on your sheets that does not belong there and you wonder if detergent/cab fare would get it out with minimal effort.
Stumbling into the living room you find the stragglers either too drunk or too hardcore to have left and you rattle empties until these debauched leftovers blindly grope their way out of the flat trailing shame and alcoholic vapour behind them.

But then there's that one guy. You know him but not all that well. Maybe you worked together three jobs ago or he knows your brother, something like that. But however he got there, two things are sure to be true about him: he lives way the fuck across town and he has no ride back.

This guy is spending the afternoon with you.

In an attempt to shake him you meet friends for brunch. He tags along. At the restaurant someone mentions something everyone should check out back at the apartment, and somehow he's right there with you. But now you're enjoying him. He's harmless. He's funny. He's slightly mental. But he's charming in his own "maybe-he doesn't even-have-a-home" way. Yeah he can hang out with your crew. Why not?

And then before you know it, there's a keg and a whole new party at your house. You weren't planning on it but the idea somehow rose organically out of drunken conversations at the midget strip club, and now the police are knocking because neighbours have complained and there's apparently some kind of law about farm animals in apartment buildings. How any of this came about is now something of a blur, but one thing is for sure: it never could have happened without that guy. You don't do stuff like this, but that guy does.

Woozy Viper's first album is the musical version of that guy.

At some point Luke and Mitch Meseke of NYC decided to stop fussing around, stop trying to reinvent the record, and start making rock and roll of the classic 60's variety.  It doesn't sound brand new, but that's a good thing. It's not mixed quite right, but that's a good thing too. This is an album for the purists. You can almost smell the dust and beer of dingy roadhouses in every riff. It's a gritty, boozy and refreshingly uncomplicated rock n' roll album made by and for people who yearn for the days when rock was about cigarettes, bottles of whisky and dirty stories about groupies, not neuroses and antidepressants.  It's two parts Lou Reed, one part young Stones, one part The Kinks, and a dash of Jim Morrison served over a Hunter S. Thompson road trip. 


And the best part is that you can get the whole album for free here. So you should go do that now.


WV01 LookOut by Mr. Shuffleupagus

WV06 DirtyRat by Mr. Shuffleupagus