From www.billjameswoods.com/music

October 2005

Hot Nelly, it's not often I hear something that sizzles my eardrums quite like Heathens Like Me the first album by New York City roots-rock upstarts the New Heathens. If it ain't a classic, and it is compared to the crap that comes invading through my car stereo every time I drive my Chevy to the levee, then it's sure as hell a tremendous harbinger of great things to come for these five dudes.

The disc stars out with a Getaway Baby, a song that puts the Small Faces into a milkshake with Rockpile and comes out thick and thumping. Then it's on to 141 in which the New Heathens transform themselves into an E-Street band, minus the stupid glockenspiel.

The best song on the album, and the one my old lady won't stop playing, is When She's Wasted, which is probably the best song ever written about a drunk girl (and my hat's off to the cajones of any band who would come right out and specifically sing about a drunk girl; not even Motley Crue did that!)

The pace of the record is the only (and I do mean only) thing that scores it a 9.9 instead of a 10. Like the earnest young rockers they are, there are a couple populist-tinged folk songs that deaden the party, but after the hoot-hollering good time that the band serves up in the honky-tonker "Back to Jesus" and, my favorite, "July 1, Near Helena, MT," you need something to keep your heart from exploding. -- Bill James-Woods