VA - "Rip This Joint" - 16 Brilliant Tracks In The Spirit OF The Rolling Stones (2010)

After a fortnight of listening to forties and fifties country and hillbilly music Rip This Joint just about blew my eardrums. Subtitled "16 brilliant tracks in the spirit of The Rolling Stones" this is an eggs-all-in-one-basket compilation. If you don't like The Stones, walk away now. If you don't like Exile On Main Street era Stones, forget it. This is music where guitarists strut like gunslingers with twitchy trigger fingers and vocalists prowl the stage like animals on heat, attacking the microphone as if unsure whether to eat it or screw it.

At first glance Rip This Joint feels like familiar, safe ground for Uncut – the Drive-By Truckers (here represented by Patterson Hood and Jason Isbell) have been included so often in these anthologies they could well be considered the magazine's house band. But at least on this occasion the compilers have spread their net a little wider – in fact country-wider. From St Louis (The Bottle Rockets) to Portland (The Shaky Hands), from Austin (The Strange Boys) to Detroit (Deadstring Brothers), together with a couple of bands (The Gourds, Bloodkin) who could be the Truckers next door neighbours in Athens Georgia, you could be forgiven for thinking the whole nation is undergoing a resurgence in ramshackle rock and roll and barroom blues when the truth is neither ever really went away.