The career of Shelton Hank Williams III (aka Hank3) has doubled as a sort of crusade in which he breaks all the rules of country music while somehow managing to honor its traditions at the same time. As he put it back in ’06, “Everybody calls themselves outlaws and all that stuff, but that’s what’s missing in country music. Everything’s so clean and pretty and perfect, and you need a couple of people in there that aren’t perfect and that don’t sound the best. That’s the way some of the best guys were, man.” Since the third-generation rebel’s most recent LP, 2010’s aptly titled Rebel Within, he’s gotten off Curb Records and launched his own label, the Megaforce-distributed Hank3 Records (the new moniker to distinguish/a representation of his post-Curb career). He’s also been busy, to say the least, writing and recording FOUR albums at once—Ghost to a Ghost/Guttertown, a double LP of refracted country music, the literally unprecedented 3 Bar Ranch Cattle Callin and the sludgy Attention Deficit Domination—and they’re all hitting on the very same day. We don’t believe anyone has done such a thing before—or even thought of doing it, for that matter. It’s too damn crazy.
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You might think this massive project was years in the making, but Hank3 somehow managed to slam together the whole enchilada in just a few months. He parted ways with Curb on Jan. 1 and started writing the songs for this massive project the very next day. The four albums were made simultaneously at the Haunted Ranch, Hank3’s home and studio on the outskirts of Nashville. They were recorded on his trusty Korg D1600—a $400, 10-year-old piece of hardware that liberated the artist from temporal and budgetary constraints while providing his records with a sonic presence that’s not exactly hi-fi nor is it low-fi; let’s just refer to it as face-melt-fi. “I got like five of ’em now, man — I take ’em with me everywhere I go,” he says of the D1600. “I was just glad to finally find a machine I could halfway work. When the energy hits, it needs to be captured; that’s the main reason why I keep it on those little machines.”
He approached the challenge of writing and recording the 60-odd songs in his characteristic way—opting for total immersion. “They were all done at once,” Hank3 explains. “Once I was in that mode, I was stayin’ in that mode as far as pumpin’ it out. A lot of it had to do with how I was feelin’, since I played drums on everything.” Packaged together, Ghost to a Ghost and Guttertown find Hank3 further mutating his trademark hellbilly sound, while the latter LP is heavily seasoned with Cajun accents. Many of the tracks have a spooky vibe, as if the music was being performed by a crew of shit-kicking zombies. In truth, the players are all fully alive: Andy Gibson on steel guitar and banjo (he also did some of the engineering), David McElfresh on fiddle and mandolin, Zach Shedd on standup bass, Daniel Mason on banjo, super-picker Johnny Hiland on guitar, Billy Contreras on fiddle, Rory Hoffman on accordion and Hank3 on everything else.
Attention Deficit Domination and Cattle Callin explore the two extremes of metal. Hank3 plays practically everything on both. Attention Deficit Domination is Hank3’s first foray into sludge, making it a radical shift in mood and tempo from the speed metal he’s been grinding out in his Assjack mode. “That’s gonna be a little different for the live fans who have been used to seein’ Assjack for the last 10 years,” he says. “Assjack was almost fast hardcore, and ADD is slow, Melvins, sleep-oriented doom rock. So it’s gonna be a lot different to see and feel compared to what most people are used to seein’ me do live. I been a fan of it for years; it’s just somethin’ else I needed to do. The record is dedicated to Layne Staley, and some of his voicings are on it.” The linchpin tracks here, says Hank3, are “Bend” the nearly nine-minute “Livin Beyond Doom.” On Cattle Callin, Hank3 has concocted a hybrid subgenre he calls “cattle core,” on which his driving, speed-metal-derived playing is juxtaposed with the sounds of auctioneers doing their traditional raps, with Hank3 sometimes laying his own high-register vocal treatments over the top. For a really extreme contrast, he brought in Mason to put some bluegrass banjo pickin’ on “Cattle Callin Lonesome Blues.”
