The Big Takeover, #56, June ’05
Grubstake
Dynamite & Other Inventions
(Nine Mile)



Boston’s "purveyors of gutbucket swamp blues" have some new designs for third LP. For old fans, the crotchety, diseased blues of 1999’s out of print Farm Use and 2001’s Ghosts of Arkadelphia reappear on such tunes as "Alligator Blues", where even an accordion sounds mean and scab-red. But Dynamite goes easier on the hard stuff and indulges their equally diseased folk-blues side. Pat McHugh is one of those naturally weird people who makes everything seem psychotic and strange (like on "Meteor Shower", as he tries to distinguish between meteor and satellite, or when he starts feeling like an alligator) as he plumbs 70-year-old riffs from the Mississippi Delta and inverts them into something dark and disturbing. Maybe he made the same bargain with the devil as Robert Johnson. But we find the dark side tempting, don’t we?
-Jack Rabid