The Sadies Pure Diamond Gold

After months of laboring blindly in a dark, moist, cavernous laboratory—the walls slick with the blood and the love of their musical forebears, the dank air charged with reverb, fuzz, and delay, and the cob-webbed corners filled with the scurrying sounds of fiddles, dobros, and banjos, The Sadies stumbled back to the light, bringing with them their second album Pure Diamond Gold.

This disc was stitched together, for your pleasure, for your amazement, using only the choicest cuts of surf, bluegrass, spaghetti western spookiness, garage punk, country murder ballads, and gospel. It is an unwieldy beast; it stumbles, it rocks, it croons, it swoons, it smokes, it swings, it knocks over drinks, it pushes sniveling, timorous townspeople out of the way with a single swipe of its mighty hand. It’s a good thing to have on your side.

Once again, handling the engineering work was ubermensch Steve Albini. There’s also some pretty amazing special appearances from the Good Brothers, Canada’s most famous bluegrass outfit, well-known on the European festival circuit, and the family of the two tallest Sadies, Travis and Dallas; their Mom and their dog even make cameos. Catherine Irwin of Freakwater stops by for a stunning little number, and Kelly Hogan lends some swooping vocals as well, thus adding a couple of pretty faces to this monster.

"Dirty, damaged, raggedy and surreal, the Sadies' brand of country draws blades tempered in the flames of urban decay. Dark yet playful, like a handful of sleeping snakes, intriguing and sensuous in one of those dark-eyes-from-across-the-bar kind of ways." —The Coast

"Pure Diamond Gold shines like the smile of an exuberant Western rascal, and it pulls no punches." —CMJ New Music Report

"The songs veer madly between hyper-traditional country expressions, surf guitar homages and mutations of the two. This is another example of what is right about alternative country's hybridization." —Country Standard Time