Cousin Harley's It's A Sin

Paul Pigat has been talked about on the Fifth Fret a few times. He was even gracious enough to let me interview him for the very first Fifth Fret interview. He’s a great guy who’s very nice and always makes the time to respond to emails or questions ranging from his instructional DVDs to tips about getting used to playing with a thumb pick or even the history about his almost universally lusted after Gibson ES350. My point is that he’s a good guy so I try to be as objective in my reviews of his products as possible but you have to understand there’s a little bit of a bias here not only because I really like him and want to see him succeed, but because I honestly haven’t heard anything that threw me off of him.

I mean, besides wading through a particularly dry spot in his jazz DVD (one that he acknowledged because hey, learning scales and modes and all that is way more boring that learning songs but they ARE integral) that will be reviewed at a later date, I’ve never been bored and I’ve always been surprised.

I think the thing that surprises me most about Pigat is the fact that he’s not pinned down to one genre, even when he’s in a band or working on a project that sounds like it would be focused and able to be filed easily in any music collection organized by genre. To be sure, there’s a definite leaning in one direction on projects but that doesn’t mean he’ll exclude anything else he can do MERELY for focus on one small niche of the music world. A great example of this that I’ve written about in the past is his acoustic album which covers a LOT of musical ground but isn’t able to be categorized as, say, “country” or anything like that. “Acoustic” is a broad term, much like Pigat’s a broad player.

Even his band Cousin Harley, which is touted as being a rockabilly band, manages to slip and slide into other subgenres of rockabilly or even skip into different genres altogether. Even as the music varies from track to track, one constant remains and it’s the constant I love the most in music:

Fantastic playing.

It’s obvious when you listen to their latest album titled “It’s A Sin” that Paul is dedicated to the guitar and knows how to play it. The tones he coaxes from it are on the verge of being clean with just a little bit of dirt (most of the time) and I think this is a great tone to show off just what he’s doing which in short is blowing your mind. You can hear how well-versed he is with Travis Picking or writing jazz songs or just rocking out with some good old fashioned rockabilly. The guy’s got chops that would make any guitarist either want to practice way more (and he’s already supplied you with three instructional DVDs and a fourth is on the way) or give up altogether. I couldn’t think about giving up though, with these super-helpful and easy to follow DVDs, but some may.

Good albums aren’t just chops though. Albums that are nothing but good chops often fall away unnoticed and unloved because, even though guitarists are certainly willing to be wowed by another guitarist, we love the SONG and without it, there’s little chance of success.

Which makes it a good thing that the songs on the album are great. Even the multiple instrumental tracks are quality with a great feel and flow. Not once do you feel like a track couldn’t be a song. Take “I’ll Keep My Old Guitar” for instance. It features such a lengthy intro that I started to think it was an instrumental and then he started singing a song about preferring the company of his trusty old guitar over the ladies and from the instrumental intro to the singing part, nothing changed. It’s not like he was rocking out and then pulled back drastically when it came time to sing because perhaps notes wouldn’t fit or the speed was too much. The song is the guitar with lyrics added on where they needed to be and THAT is a theme that runs through the album.

That’s a theme I like.

“Rockabilly” is a pretty gigantic term and one I’ve discovered that I don’t really like to use because it seems like a cop out. It definitely seems like I would be short-changing the artist. After all, rockabilly to me (Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran, Carl Perkins and Brian Setzer) may not be considered rockabilly by others (perhaps someone’s idea of rockabilly is more modern and quite different sounding like Tiger Army, the Horrorpops, Nekromantix or the Meteors). There’s nothing wrong with what your idea of rockabilly is, it’s just that there are some that might associate rockabilly with a certain sound and they’re not a fan of that sound so they want to stay away from anything with the label.

So I’m here to say that although Cousin Harley is called a rockabilly band, if you’re a guitarist you should check them out and listen for yourself. Personally I think that It’s A Sin is far more a roots music album than a rockabilly album because of everything it covers. I’m pretty sure that every guitarist who is interested in the guitar and what it can do and not quite so hung up on genres or limiting your musical input would love this album.

Check it out, folks. Let me know what you think.

-Pappy