Immediately, the combination of southern rock and anti-establishment politics seems contradictory. The hillbilly rhythms and big all-balls-no-brains guitars smack of good-ole-boy to me–a skinny dude who went to a high school filled with no-neck jocks who worked on acquiring dumber, more country accents. If you’re going to sound like a good-ole-boy then your raging against good-ole-boys isn’t going to go over well.

Mike D’s voice is hoarse in a way that would make Steve Earle envious, but I get the impression that the accent is largely put-on. Call it Southerner’s Intuition, but I know that his pronunciation of “nightmare” to sound like “nait-mayer” is all performance. I doubt the accent is completely inauthentic but no matter how coarse the voice is, that over-accented, stretched-out pronunciation makes my skin crawl–like when Shania Twain says “gol-darned.” And no matter what, it sounds ignorant.

I’m more than willing to grant people leeway for fun ignorance (it’s only rock ‘n’ roll, after all), but there’s no fun to be had in D’s lyrics. He’s “in the mud,” got “nothing left to believe” and plans to “spend the apocalypse drunk and passed out on the floor.” To him, “life ain’t nothin’, man.” With such anti-life lyrics, his rants on Charlton Heston, Ted Nugent, George Dubya and Dick Cheney come across just as confused as his bleak outlook on his own life.

“The Ballad of Courtney Taylor”–a entire song dedicated to mocking the singer of the Dandy Warhols–is gratuitously mean to the point of being hateful. This isn’t the Dead Milkmen or Nerf Herder or a similar bunch of nerds poking fun at a wannabe rockstar; this is a big, rough dude who gets wasted getting mad at some little dude that nobody really cares about anyway.

The turmoil reaches its apex in the album’s closer “Sixsixfive”–where D lashes out (again) at himself but also at his background. D says he “let the devil up in my chest” and “let god up in me,” yet he’s still confused. No surprise; it’s an album full of lyrics about relying on some outside power whether higher or lower. Never does Mike D rely on reason or objective reality. He never worked really hard and ended up drunk and passed out on the floor.

Turmoil can occasionally make for compelling art, but as I mentioned at the outset, I Can Lick Any SOB sounds like a gang of redneck thugs–the kind of guys I’d be wary of running into. It doesn’t help that I already know the singer’s an unreasonable man.