The Barbarellatones, Beyond the Valley of the Barbarellatones

My first mistake was telling Space City Rock editor Jeremy that he could send me whatever he wanted. My second mistake was not getting completely drunk before listening to Beyond the Valley of the Barbarellatones. I really should have known better. The front cover of the self-released disc’s sleeve features a banana hammock-clad Robby Quine (formerly of Sex with Lurch), and the track-list on the back (which includes such titular gems as “Gothabilly Gulch” and “Baby Wants a Corndog”) should have sent me running for a bottle. Surely a record that sounds like the result of an incredibly drunken, “hey, wouldn’t this be funny” recording session would’ve sounded better if accompanied by some of Kentucky’s finest, right?

Unfortunately for me, I was not so insightful as to pick up on this, and thus had to suffer through eleven tracks of surf-glam-gothabilly without the aid of inebriation. For those of you who enjoy the “this-sounds-like-that” method of rock criticism, the Barbarellatones sound like what you’d get if Southern Culture on the Skids re-imagined the soundtrack to The Rocky Horror Picture Show, but without wit or skill.

That’s really all that’s necessary to say about this particular record, though I will leave you with a parting thought, taken from the first track on the album, “Hellhound,” the blood-soaked, debauched tale of “Jethro, the Gothabilly Dog”: “He’ll sniff your bottom oh so fast / Jethro loves the stinky smell of ass / I see two glowing red lights in the fog / the eyes of Jethro, the Gothabilly dog.”