A German website, musicmatic A German website, musicmatic.de, says ...

I stumbled across Trouble Down South during my short time as editor of that which has now degenerated into the Philadelphia Weekly. Our music editor, Pete Brown, passed along a few CDs to review. One was a Texas bunch called Little Jack Melody and the Young Turks, most noteworthy for their tuba version of Beethoven's Ninth. Another was an Iris DeMent. I'm sorry, but I really, really dislike Iris DeMent's voice, which reminds me of mucilage sliding down a windowpane.

But the other disc was the Horsies. Their influences were peculiar, their combining of them unlikely and their on-the-cheap notes close to non-existent. I bounced around the room listening, trying to figure, "Now I know I recognize that, but what the hell is it?" Then it hit me: mbaqanga from Soweto, amorously entwined with Western swing. I doubted my senses until I saw that one line in the notes: "Thanks to The Indestructible Beat of Soweto."

A six-member Austin band, the Horsies fused guitar, bass, drums with accordion, keyboards, clarinet, pennywhistle. Beyond Soweto and Western swing, it's hard to pin down everything flowing through, since they don't seem constrained by type or style. There's Tex-Mex, maybe a bit of 40s noir soundtrack, a hint of Mideast, even some Laurie Anderson noise.

Somebody described them as a garage band, which I find puzzling, unless their garage houses a Jag front- send stitched to a horse wagon. Somebody else suggested klezmer?maybe they had the Horsies confused with Itzhak Perlman. But their looping, unpretentious title track may hold the real secret: "It's nothing special, we're just some people who want just to play."

Unfortunately, there's no lyric sheet; the female vocalists tend to cancel each other out like an interference pattern, and I'm an aging fuck who's losing his upper register. At least, unlike with the Cocteau Twins, I can be sure they're singing in an actual language and that that language is English.

What ties everything together, though, is an inherent tension between voice and instrument, as in "We Love Ourselves," where slow, flowing vocals drift over a light, fast Afro run ?a swaying harem girl riding a dancing burro.

"Pyramid Woman" opens with a scratchy spoken line from the Boris Karloff oldie, The Black Cat: "He has an intense and all-consuming horror?of cats," then spins into a rocking-horse romp. The music could be from anywhere, a clean, lovely clarinet line alternating with dense vocals (just can't make out those lyrics) backed by high percussion and a syncopated tick-tock.

"Cows" is one of two songs that almost perfectly merges Western swing with the Soweto beat ("Cowboy Caterpillar" is the other). Then there's "Noam Chomsky," the only track for which they didn't write the music. Who did? Perez Prado. It alternates heavy political quotes spoken by Chomsky with chanted lines and a light-as-a-feather upbeat instrumental.

My favorite is "Still Life With Blue," as alive a piece of music as you'll ever hear: "Long tongue, e-e-e-a-ats cum?" Wha'? Really? Maybe it eats something else? But into the musical gap, clear as a bell, "What do you think of folks who eat cum?" Then "Still Life" slides into a swirling, wordless vocal line followed by an instrumental that incorporates almost every imaginable influence.

What's Out There: Squat. Last look, Amazon.com had Trouble Down South for sale through four of their storelets. Can't even track down the band members.