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“ I put down a fifth today, but I only did a little bit of cocaine,” intones Pierce, blowing up the last word. Meanwhile, the rhymes pump forth as if from a hospital IV:: “ I’ve been up for days and days that I still can’t remember/ And I spent a year or so, just trying to forget her/ Wouldn’t let go when she wanted to run/ Sometimes a needle is a smoking gun.”: Deep, heavy, and melancholic, “Say No to Drugs” still soars, chopping white-line fever by utilizing a troubadour’s credit card.
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Looks like Gibby Haynes, sounds like Leon Russell, wrote one geezer, and on “Say No to Drugs,” the bandleader manages the command of the former without the aid of a bullhorn, yet with the anthemic magnetism of the latter’s late musical realism. “ I tried saying no to drugs, but the drugs don’t take ‘no’ for an answer/ I took a turn at falling in love with a sweet little dancer.” Like Charley Crockett, the vocal fingerprints of Choctaw Wildfire’s alter-ego hook the ear at every point, here his “-er” on “answer” and “dancer” taking a hard R, like “-errr.”: And the substance in question spills literally, but also ingests Bryan Ferry’s favorite opiate and most musicians’ ultimate life narcotic: “ I paid my dues eating up road/ Lord, it’s the only life I’ll ever know.”: Feel Pierce hammering down on piano, too, the ambience of the room big, bold, and brassy, like they cut Uh-Huh live at the Preservation Hall in New Orleans, only with a booming drum sound off the Secret Machines. Think Orson Welles.: From the count-in on the first of eight tracks, “Say No to Drugs,” Hawkeye – er, Pierce – resounds right up front in the mix: left channel, right channel, mid channel, chest cavity. No in-between here for Omniscient, the narrator. “Omnipresence,” bigass word: “the presence of God everywhere at the same time.” Charlie Pierce possesses such an Old Testament voice on Uh-Huh, that of the One Above or He That Dwells Down Below.