Growl is a country and folk album by Ray Wylie Hubbard on Philo / Umgd. This is the CD edition. This edition was released on April 8, 2003.
As most music gets slicker and slicker, Hubbard grows more and more crude; Growl is even more eternal and lowdown than Eternal and Lowdown, its predecessor, on which he first explicitly relied on blues roots. With Gurf Morlix again producing, melodies meander and stumble through faraway guitars and fat, echoing bass and drums while Hubbard ponders his usual Big 'Uns such as sin, loneliness, temptation, betrayal, and afterlife. There's plenty of slow, shimmering bottleneck, nimble fingerpicking, and dark Southern Gothic. "Purgatory Road" could be a rewrite of "Tobacco Road" by the very wasted offspring of Tony Joe White and Bobbie Gentry. Now and again, the band shows it can also rock, as on the (perhaps overly) jaundiced "Rock-N-Roll Is a Vicious Game," or chug, as on "Stolen Horses." The biting Hubbard wit may be pretty much absent here, but that's okay, too, because this stuff packs enough of a wallop that you don't miss it. --John Morthland
