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Stan Martin
Cigarettes and Cheap Whiskey
Twangtone Records
By William Michael Smith
 Few honky tonk records
manage to make it from start to finish without falling into the
traps of parody, irony, and outright lame schtick, or without
veering into self-conscious alt.country drollness or slavish
retro devotion to style over gray matter substance. Avoidance
of all the usual traps makes Stan Martin's Cigarettes and
Cheap Whiskey a keeper debut album. Scary thing is that even
though this is longtime Boston-area sideman Martin's first full-length
record, he makes it seem terribly easy. Most honky-tonk albums
wear thin to my ear fairly quickly, but Cigarettes and Cheap
Whiskey is the exception, sounding fresh and bearing up well
after considerable repetition.
The multi-talented Martin, who does all the singing, lead
guitar work, and songwriting, has a firm fix on country fundamentals.
His guitar tone is Pete Anderson huge and his songwriting mines
the stylistic and subject-matter traditions of the genre but
never settles for trite lines and tired clichés. He also
has managed a nice sequencing of the tracks so that a listener
is never left with that "this one sounds like the last one"
one-trick-pony feeling that dogs so many modern honky-tonk records.
With his booming Telecaster and powerful voice developed in
the ten years he has been a member of one of Boston's premier
bar bands, The Merles, Martin's originals like "(Walking
On) The Wild Side of Life," "Honky Tonk Fever"
and "Thinking You're Wrong" work the hard-country ground
of Dwight Yoakam in his early Guitars, Cadillacs period,
while Martin's Roy-Orbison-on-steroids sound on "Don't Tell
Me It's Over" seems to share a party line with Raul Malo
and The Mavericks. Martin may be from Pepperell, Massachusetts,
but he knows his sawdust floor country, his Western swing, his
two-steps and his polka. He even bows toward the psycho-twang
roadhouse roots rock of Webb Wilder on the slinky, echo-laden
"Baby, I'm Gone." Where I come from, that's as good
a formula as any for an atomic country album.
www.stanmartin.net
Contact William Michael Smith at wms-at-rockzilla.net
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