The Reverend Horton Heat - Space Heater - Music & Performance - CD

On his fifth album, the reverend of warped rockabilly takes his reverb and tremolo-drenched guitar down a road that leads dangerously close to radio-ready modern-rock. Whether this is a good or a bad thing will depend on your particular purity requirements, but there's no denying the catchiness of the stop-start power-chord guitar rhythms in "Lie Detector" or the nearly rapped verses of "Revolution Under Foot."

This is a man exploiting his commercial potential and having a blast at the same time. And lest you forget why they call him Reverend, SPACE HEATER has blissful guitar instrumentals like "The Prophet Stomp" and the spaghetti-Western-tinged "Pride of San Jacinto" and redneck garage-rock anthems like "Baby I'm Drunk." Some things, happily, never change. The token surf-guitar song on an earlier Horton Heat album was called "I Can't Surf"; this time around he tries an NRBQ-styled raveup about the kind of surfing he actually can do--"Couch Surfin'."