Pain By Numbers

On this album, 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.

Full Description

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 album, 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 ("Monday Morning") to Johnny Paycheck ("It Won't Be Long") to Dusty Springfield ("In the Middle of Nowhere") to alt-country progenitors Rank & File ("Amanda Ruth") to Lee Hazlewood ("I'd Rather Be Your Enemy"), The Meat Purveyors are a wonderfully volatile concoction. Homespun tunes like their blazing new theme song "TMP Smackdown" or the drinker's lament "How Can I Be So Thirsty Today?" (with the killer follow up "when I had so much to drink last night") show a free-wheeling, sparks-a-flying band still having a ball.

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?

Choice Cuts:
TMP Smackdown
How Can I Be So Thirsty Today?
Daydreams About Night things
Amanda Ruth

Short Description

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
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
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
Mosh pit or dosie-do? Use your own discretion. Stiles fluency on mandolin is staggering. Cohen and DiMond's lilting, bittersweet harmonies are perfect. Given solid blocks, the band builds a mansion.

— Rockzilla
This shit is as sweet as Tupelo honey, because the punkgrass outfit pulls it all together here. Vocals dripping with unfettered abandon, slapping, picking, and fiddling with furlough from the state hospital urgency, and mando trills as quick-n-smooth as a neat glass of batch bourbon. Fun, like riding a runaway horse bareback and naked.

— Austin Chronicle