review in The Current - 9/12/2007

By Gilbert Garcia/Serene Dominic

The H!X are a good example of what happens when baby boomers go nuts.

If Claude “Butch” Morgan and his band of rootsy pranksters were in their teens, their healthy absurdist streak would manifest itself in loud, fast, aggressive dissonance and maybe a bit of onstage auto-destruction. But while they’re more than a little bent, the H!X are also traditional and sentimental (not to mention musically accomplished), so they sneak their strangeness into a semi-acoustic package that inevitably pleases alt-country regulars at Casbeers and Luckenbach.

Any H!X fan will tell you that you have to see this quartet in the act to understand them, so it makes sense that their new CD, Really Live, documents the loose, madcap nature of those shows.

Morgan’s humor rears its head on “I Hate Music,” a plea for silence with some ironic guitar heroics in the middle. He also hams it up on “WhatsaMatta,” a slender hook masquerading as a song, by bragging about an amazing guitar lick he’s learned, and then supposedly playing it so fast that everyone misses it. Only slightly more serious are “Eddie,” the tale of a “self-appointed security guard” who spends his life riding around town on a bicycle, and “Blubberball,” in which Morgan invites listeners to watch his body decompose.

The flipside of Morgan’s comic shtick is his earnest singer-songwriter persona, which he showcases on “G-Pa” and “Kingdom.” But he and the H!X are most appealing when they bring levity to their sincerity and determination to their hijinks, as with their cover of James Brown’s “I Got You (I Feel Good).” Clearly in love with the song, the band nonetheless refuses to aproach it with reverence, giddily recasting it as an accordion-driven, conjunto dance number. Without a doubt, these clowns understand their roots.

— Gilbert Garcia

Photo credit in the Current goes to Steve Lewis