Americana UK
The Musician, Leicester
3rd November 2004
The last time I saw Jason Ringenberg I was worried that he was focusing more on his supercharged crowd-pleasing live show at the expense of his songs. Turns out I needn’t have worried. His new album “Empire Builders” is a well-up-scratch selection with a strong political edge, and the songs from it feature heavily tonight. The Musician is packed with the faithful, who roar him on, lurid gold shirt, silver Stetson and all, through a trademark rip-roaring evening of classics old and new. It is, of course, the day after that election result, and his comments on same generate much nodding of heads and applause. Like all thinking artists, he’s not anti-American, but anti-America’s current rulers and their attitudes, and no song epitomizes this more than “New-Fashioned Imperialist”, performed in fine sardonic style, which while a trifle heavy-handed and akin to shooting fish in a barrel does a necessary job because, lets face it, those fish need to be shot. The old Scorchers material is not neglected though. There’s plenty of time for requests, which means we get “Help! There’s a Fire”,“Money Talks” and of course his twenty-years-on-still-stunning take on “Absolutely Sweet Marie”. In fact all the old stuff sounds as fresh as it did the first time I saw the band at the Camden Palace in the mid-Eighties. He still has that unbelievable energy level, high-kicking and bouncing his way around the stage, which he sustains through two long sets (as well as apparently having done a children’s “Farmer Jason” show earlier in the day), throwing himself around like the twenty-something country punk he once was, well still is really. As he says himself, the election result means that he’s now a protest singer for the next four years, and there are few better and none more entertaining.

Jeremy Searle