Regarding the Violent Femmes album Hallowed Ground, James Christopher Monger writes in Allmusic: “The album’s centerpiece, a searing indictment of loyalties broken and the snitches that break them, ‘Never Tell’ is the perfect balm for the bloody righteousness of youth; and when [Gordon] Gano screams, ‘I’ll stand right up in the heart of Hell / I never tell’, it’s hard not to stand right beside him. Christian imagery aside, Hallowed Ground is not as polarizing as some make it out to be. The band explores gothic Appalachian folk and child murder on the banjo-fueled ‘Country Death Song’, bawdy and bluesy Lou Reed-inflected infatuation on ‘Sweet Misery Blues’, and nuclear holocaust on the brooding title track [‘Hallowed Ground’], leaving little doubt that this is the same band that penned underground classics like ‘Gone Daddy Gone’ and ‘Add it Up’. Even the decidedly politically uncorrect ‘Black Girls’, with its free jazz mid-section that includes everything from jaw harp to the screaming alto sax of John Zorn and the Horns of Dilemma, is full of the same smirk and swagger that made ‘Blister in the Sun’ the soundtrack to so many people’s halcyon days.”
(November 2014)
