Peace Queer

Peace Queer is a short and bittersweet gem, a rant that's funny enough to make the venom sting all the more and a cry of protest with joy and compassion in its heart.

On this eight-song EP--available for free on his Web site--the amiable 42-year-old lends his peach-cobbler drawl to songs about maimed soldiers and power-drunk bullies, a doleful cover of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s 'Fortunate Son' and 'Mission Accomplished (Because You Gotta Have Faith),' which deploys a Bo Diddley beat to excoriate a leader who “drove us off a cliff and told us we were flyin’.”

Todd Snider's a misfit's kind of misfit, and like his previous disc, "The Devil You Know," his latest eight-song offering cuts biting satire into the truly poignant.

With the help of folks like Kevn Kinney, Patty Griffin, Will Kimbrough, and others, Snider gives us eight songs that pack more wallop than their laid-back vibe suggests.

The other two tunes here, the instrumental 'Ponce of the Flaming Peace Queer' and a once-again-relevant cover of 'Fortunate Son,' work fine, but, coupled with the album’s brief tracklist and tossed-off nature, they make Peace Queer little more than a focused stop-gap between proper albums.

For his last couple of albums, cowpunk songster Snider has pitched himself in the sort of satiracally confrontational and liberal-minded territory occuupied by Randy Newman or Steve Earle. Peace Queer follows that pattern. [Jan 2008, p.113]