The Meat Purveyors Pain By Numbers

It doesn't matter to The Meat Purveyors if you're on a bar stool or a lawn chair, if you're drinking out of a pitcher of lemonade or a sweaty tall boy, if you're wearing white knee socks, sandals and khaki shorts or a Minor Threat T-shirt and jack boots, TMP will work it for YOU.

On Pain By Numbers, their fourth CD, TMP has distilled their attack down to the essentials: three parts liquid nitro, three parts stare-into-the-bottom-of-the-glass heartbreak, and four parts Let's Take It Outside, Short Pants.

With a keen eye for covers ranging from Fleetwood Mac to Johnny Paycheck, The Meat Purveyors are a wonderfully volatile concoction. They will woo you with tender ballads, only to upside you one with a gen-u-wine sonic smackdown on the flipside. They'll kick down the door at your next party, knock over the bowl of punch, and flirt with your S.O. They are the guests that frighten you when they arrive, but you sure miss 'em after they leave. Yeah, bluegrass CAN be nice, polite affair, but where is the fun in that?

"These loyal deconstructionists are a trashy treasure ... TMP mine their musical riches from the middle ground between pure and absurd. They love bluegrass enough to kick the dust off the form, but they don't wear goofy hick hats or play junkyard appliances." —Austin American-Statesman

"Long lauded for their ingenious appropriation of the hits and misses of others, TMP increasingly deserve praise for their own accomplished musicanship. More than the sum of their traditions, TMP bring bluegrass, punk, pop, blues and country together to create a genre-defying music whose love songs rollick with black humor taken from their victims' pain." —St Louis Post Dispatch

"While their essence may spring from the shared punk-country aesthetic of three chords and the truth, the musicianship displayed is much too accomplished to stay in the garage. [This CD] best demonstrates the band's willingness to leapfrog past the standard issue harmonies of separation and loss to a land where hearts are not only broken, but stomped on by steel-toed boots and finished off with a satisfied grin." —East Bay Express