Thee Merry Widows- Revenge Served Cold

ARTIST: Thee Merry Widows
ALBUM: Revenge Served Cold
LABEL: Cargo Music
REVIEWER: Matthew J.
DATE: 5-20-07

Billed as "America's first all-female psychobilly band," Thee Merry Widows already have a solid enough gimmick that they don't need to worry about being particularly groundbreaking. Good psychobilly isn't really about originality so much as fun and musical chops anyway, and the members of this fearsome female five-piece are good at what they do. Lead singer Eva Von Slut has a deep, vaguely androgynous voice, a bit like a less masculine Eva O., and it serves her well on more aggressive tracks like "Holy Hack Jack" and "Talk Shit, Spit Blood." Musically, these 11 tracks range from relatively straightforward horror punk on "The Curse" and the extraordinarily catchy "Black Widow" to more atmospheric rockabilly-inspired material on "Revenge," which features some excellent '50s style backing vocals, and the Tex-Mex vampire ballad "Deadly Kiss," which can't help but recall such border-town vampire flicks as John Carpenter's "Vampires" and Rodriguez and Tarantino's "From Dusk Till Dawn." Perhaps the most original, though, is the cow-punk twang of "Girl Assassins." For psychobilly fans, there are only one or two missteps here, the most egregious being "Grave Robbers (From Outer Space)," a dud of an Ed Wood and Misfits rehash, but for a raucous cemetery punk party you can't do much better than this.

Visit the ladies at www.merrywidowsmusic.com for more.