Hotheads (Boiled in Lead album)
| Hotheads | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
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| Studio album by Boiled in Lead | ||||
| Released | 1986 | |||
| Genre | Celtic rock/Celtic punk, folk punk, gypsy punk | |||
| Label | Atomic Theory Records | |||
| Boiled in Lead chronology | ||||
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| Professional ratings | |
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| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| AllMusic |   |
| Guinness Encyclopedia of Popular Music | |
| MusicHound Folk | |
| Twin Cities Reader |  |
| Green Man Review | (positive) |
Hotheads is the second album by Twin Cities-based alt-rock/world-music band Boiled in Lead. Like its predecessor BOiLeD iN lEaD, it is strongly centered on a blend of alt-rock and traditional Celtic folk, and has been called its "most roundly Celtic" album. The album consists largely of traditional folk songs, plus a cover of Ewan MacColl's "Go! Move! Shift! (The Moving-on Song)", but the band's raucous, garage-rock approach to the material displayed a cross-genre sensibility, interpolating country and rockabilly into the mix, that would develop even further on later albums. The shift in sound was partially a consequence of the band's evolving lineup. Fiddle player Dave Stenshoel had replaced the departed Brian Fox, and Todd Menton now joined Jane Dauphin on lead vocals and guitar. Menton's style lent itself to both traditional takes on folk songs, as on "The House-Husband's Lament," and what Chuck Lipsig of Green Man Review called "a very loud, raucous, and sometimes incomprehensible punk version" of "The Gypsy Rover", which even featured the sound of a chainsaw. Bassist Drew Miller described Boiled in Lead's version as a conscious rejection of the folk-purist ethos: "We gave that song the beating it richly deserved, since it's such a hackneyed standard of the Irish pub circuit."
The album won a Minnesota Music Award for Best Celtic/Bluegrass/Folk Album in 1987.
Hotheads and BOiLeD iN lEaD were later collected on 1991's Old Lead, with two previously unreleased tracks recorded during the Hotheads sessions.
Both Boiled in Lead and the Hotheads album appear in Emma Bull's 1987 urban fantasy novel War for the Oaks; the band itself has a cameo as the opening act for the protagonists' climactic performance at Minneapolis nightclub First Avenue, while the album appears during a quieter moment earlier in the book, when the main character plays the record while having a conversation.
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