| Houston underground stoner/metal band Mr. Plow has signed with California independent record label Ripple Music. The veteran group will release its new LP, Maintain Radio Silence, on August 10. The Texas band’s first LP of new music in over a decade is also the unit’s fourth of its career, which began nearly 20 years ago. In advance of the album’s release, New Noise magazine premieres the new Mr. Plow song “Hammer Smashed Face” which, somewhat surprisingly, is not a Cannibal Corpse cover of the same name. Check out “Hammer Smashed Face” at this location.
“‘Hammer Smashed Face’ is a song inspired by the Brash Brewing Company beer of the same name,” comments guitarist / vocalist Justin Waggoner. “When we wrote the song, we assumed that ‘Hammer Smashed Face’ was merely a graphic and accurate description of the medicinal qualities of the Brash beer bearing the name, which tastes really good, goes down really smooth, and has an ABV exceeding 14 percent. As it turns out, there is a Cannibal Corpse song called ‘Hammer Smashed Face’ that was the actual source of the beer’s name. In retrospect, it makes sense. After all, Brash is, without question, the most metal brewery in Texas, if not the world. Anyway, sorry, Cannibal Corpse. We meant no disrespect. We were just trying to score some free beer.”
Mr. Plow formed in 1997 when Kyuss and Fu Manchu were blowing out speakers in car systems across the land and the term “stoner rock” was joining the lexicon via music writers who needed a category for riff-based rock that was tuned down and turned up. The band was influenced heavily by the then-burgeoning scene, but sought a different direction lyrically, referencing pop-culture touchstones and good times while creating records like ‘Head On’ (2000), ‘Cock Fights and Pony Racin” (2003) and ‘Asteroid 25399’(2006) that played like soundtracks for summer trips to the beach or skatepark. In a 2017 spotlight, Mr. Plow was hailed as “Houston’s Best-Kept Sludge-Rock Secret” by theHouston Press.
On the new LP, ‘Maintain Radio Silence‘, and with songs fashioned after author Kurt Vonnegut, like “Deadeye Dick”, and influences from comic books, J.R.R. Tolkien and The Simpsons (“Mr. Plow” is the title of Season 4, Episode 9), the Houston band has again found inspiration in clever modern tales and cultural references not typically found in heavy music lyrics. The LP even boasts a song titled “Samizdat,” which means the clandestine copying and distribution of literature banned by the state, especially in the formerly communist countries of Eastern Europe. |
