b-sides: Texas Hippie Coalition

For more than a decade, Texas Hippie Coalition has been honing a blend of metal and Southern rock, but with something more. A special sauce, if you will (a musical one — not that they don’t do alright marketing their “Buckin’ Crazy” BBQ sauce). The quartet’s songs hold hard-forged links to the country singer-songwriter vibe peculiar to the Red Dirt region where Texas meets Oklahoma.

Still, though they carry some unique nuances, their foremost method for expression is with the roaring, chugging and howling of serious Pantera disciples.

Big Dad Ritch is a mountain of a man singing up front — there’ll be no mistaking him on the stage at Trixie’s. When LEO asked what he had in mind when he started working toward an album that would eventually be called Dark Side of Black, he said, “I’ve been listening to some Johnny Cash, and noticing how he was getting deeper, and darker, in some of his songs. Letting you see inside the soul of a man, even if it wasn’t lit by the best light, so to speak. I kind of wanted that to happen on this album. Me and John [Exall, the band’s bassist and co-founder] had been talking for years about doing a black album. Half-jokingly, somewhat-seriously — everybody wants to ‘do a Spinal Tap’ and have a Black Album: Metallica, and Prince as well.”

He sees life lessons in these new tracks. Take “Villain,” for instance: “There’s a lot of idol worship where you’re worshiping someone who’s The Hero only because they tell you that they are. But, in time, the battle will work itself out, and all the lies that the so-called hero is spinning are gonna come to light. And when that happens you’re gonna see that it’s been the villain who’s been saving your ass all along.” If that sounds like it’s speaking to this year’s politics, Ritch has things even more universal in mind: “The song ‘Knee Deep,’ which lends itself to Southern country-rock, is about stealing the hand of a woman from another man. Yet she finds true happiness from that. From dark places, there’s always something worth bringing to the light.”

Texas Hippie Coalition plays Trixie’s (6112 Preston Hwy.) Sunday, May 15 at 7 p.m. 18+, $15.