Hadacol is a four-piece band from Kansas City founded by brothers Fred and Greg Wickman. Both brothers are guitar-playing singer/songwriters. This is their debut recording and they are what is commonly referred to as a roots rock band. To put in another way, their style is a high energy, honky-tonk, juke joint, shit kicking sound that I’m sure elicits many yee-ha’s and ya-hoo’s from their audience. It’s all original material and it’s truly a great set of music. Rounding out the quartet is Richard Burgess on bass and Scott McCuiston on drums.
The name Hadacol comes from the potent part alcohol, part laxative elixir that sponsored the Hank Williams radio show of the late 40’s. (In case you were interested.) The title cut, "Better Than This," opens the disc as the Wickmans sing with just the right amount of attitude in their voices. Certain songs such as "Big Tornado" represent the quintessential midwest roots rock sound. Other tunes such as "Somebody Lied" and "Messed Up" are good examples of old-fashioned, blue-collar rock and roll. Another song called "Rebel Boys" could easily become a new teen anthem. The opening line is "my mom says she don’t like my leather, wait til she sees these new tatoos."
As I already said, all of the twelve songs on the disc are originals with half of them written by Greg and half by Fred. Unfortunately, the song sequence on the back of the disc is all screwed up. So when I read that Fred wrote songs 1,2, 4, 6, 8, and 11, I’m not sure if they’re referring to the songs as they’re listed on the back of the disc or as they actually play when you pop in the CD. I guess it really doesn’t matter anyway. I enjoyed all of the songs.
Roots rock is interesting music. It’s not quite blues and it’s not quite country. Yet this disc could easily appeal to fans of blues, country, rockabilly, and old time rock and roll. Hadacol pulls all of these influences together for their own original sound. This is really an impressive debut recording from this young band out of Kansas City and it comes highly recommended.
****1/2