By Lotto Chancellor
What all can you do with a blues skeleton? For starters, get it high as hell and drown it in whiskey, beer, and more whiskey, then drop it in a vat of chitterling grease and give it a megaphone. That’s my conclusion after seeing New Orleans’ own Morning 40 Federation at the Boom Boom Room last Friday.
Scully, Andrepont, Cohen and (just barely) Calandra
From the git-go, Morning 40 Federation made the most of that Boom Boomin’ system. Lead singer Josh Cohen came out of the gate slinging rhymes about 40-drinking, asking mid-flow, “Have you ever seen a white boy this drunk on the street?” Sure enough, this opening funk-hop number had all the white girls shaking their asses. Cohen smeared his manifold vocal interpretations like he was your pappy, offering up, at one point, one of the dirtiest cokesnorts I’ve ever heard. Whenever Cohen was otherwise occupied — blowing straightforward, thick, and heavy Baritone lines, or boozing — it was guitarist Ryan Scully who delighted to grab the vocal by the proverbial balls. The two wound up basically sharing the task of carrying the songs, whether in unison or by alternately crooning, screaming, and growling about flake, hookers, ex-bandmembers, and your mother. Scully found just the right amount of self-congratulation in an affected falsetto. Somehow, the rhythm section of Steve Calandra and Mike Andrepont kept things together; guitarist Bailey Smith awoke now and again from his stage-drunk state to wail on something. From all sides it was a skank-out, stank-out, relentless kind of rock and roll, full of winks and nods at blues music’s perfectly messy history.
So if you like ebb-and-flow mood arrangements, and perhaps some degree of emotional sensitivity in your music, don’t expect as much from this bunch of easy drunkards. But if you want some of that good olski from down the Bayou, the kind that thrums of Dumpsterjuice inspiration (Dumpsterjuice is, as Cohen explained, the stuff that oozes out of the trash compressors during post-Mardi Gras street-cleaning efforts), dig these guys.