Saturday Night: Southern Culture On The Skids At The Continental Club

Photos by Jason Wolter

Southern Culture on the Skids is back there somewhere.

​Southern Culture on the Skids
Continental Club
March 26, 2011

Finger lickin': It's not just for fried chicken anymore.

This past weekend, Southern Culture on the Skids packed up the eight-piece box and headed down to Texas from Soul City, N.C., as they've done each spring for the past several years. We understand Soul City is somewhere in the vicinity of hoops-mad Chapel Hill, but for our purposes it's wherever the quartet happens to set up camp.

​Unlike in years past, SCOTS came to the Continental Club behind an album of all-new material, last year's The Kudzu Ranch. Stranger still, one of the new songs, "Highlife," contained a tinge of melancholy, something about as rare in the Southern Culture canon as references to William F. Buckley Sr. or Jacques Barzun. It just hung in the air for a second, so we can't be sure if it's something SCOTS layered into the song on purpose or something we read into it all by ourselves.

The only other moment that could have conceivably turned any smiles upside down came at the very end, and only by association. Given recent events, it was hard not to think of what's happening on the other side of the International Date Line when Southern Culture closed with the Louvin Brothers' "Great Atomic Power," but the performance itself was as turbocharged as the two hours that had preceded it.

On to happier subjects.