Bob Log III, Scott H. Biram, Possessed by Paul James

If you're unfamiliar with Hillgrass Bluebilly Entertainment, it's the Austin-based booking agency whose clients make generous use of the stomp box (that small wooden box with a microphone pickup inside that, when struck with the foot, makes a tremendous racket), release albums with names like Log Bomb, Dirty Old One Man Band and Cold and Blind, and have been known, on occasion, to draw unflattering comparisons between womankind and the devil. In other words, that wild-eyed hillbilly blues gene born of too much rotgut whiskey and sun-drenched days in the sharecropping fields has hardly been bred out of existence — it's just skipped several generations and migrated west to the Texas Hill Country, in the case of Kerrville's Possessed by Paul James and San Marcos's Scott H. Biram, and all the way out to Tucson in the case of helmet-wearing weirdo (even for this bunch) Bob Log III. These three gentlemen don't so much strum their guitars as assault them, and their lyrics rush past at a mile a minute as each works out his negotiations with God, Satan and/or the bottle on the fly. Even Rudz, which endures some of the loudest and heaviest music in town on a more or less nightly basis, might have to open a window or two for this one.