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Violent Femmes self-titled first album was hailed as a classic and you still hear Blister In The Sun on radio stations and cheesy movie soundtracks to this day. Their second album, Hallowed Ground, was considered a disappointment by music critics and the vast majority of fans. With songs like Country Death Song, Never Tell, Jesus Walking on the Water, and Black Girls the album confronted singer Gordon Gano’s lifelong battle with religion (he was the son of a Baptist minister) rather than rehashing the teen-angsty lightheartedness of the first album. Because of the dark tone of the songs and some of the more experimental sounds used (including a horn section led by John Zorn) the album was a flop.
Music critics wrote reviews claiming that Gano had let the success of the first album go to his head and that the lyrics of the older, more mature Gano were not as interesting as those written by the angsty, teenage Gano. Gordon replied to these reviews, revealing that he wrote the lyrics to every song on Hallowed Ground while zoning out in his 10th and 11th grade math classes, the exact same time period when he wrote the songs for the first album. According to Gano the inaccuracy of the reviews were very telling to him about how adept most music critics are.
This is probably my favorite Violent Femmes album for a lot of reasons and Country Death Song is probably one of the more interesting tracks. It’s dark, religious undertones are indicative of what will be found on the rest of the album.
NOTE: this is not a real Violent Femmes music video, this is an art student’s animation project, but I think it fits the song very well and I liked it enough to post it here.
