Dex's midnight rumblers               

Music was left poorer by the 2024 loss of Dex Romweber.

The erstwhile Flat Duo Jets' frontman was a hulking and stentorian-voiced guitar-basher. He quivered and jittered in onstage paroxysms and, following the FDJ's term, issued numerous solo discs of rum aspect. Each slashed.

In 2025, he was posthumously inducted into the North Carolina Music Hall of Fame. 

And last June saw the second North Carolina DexFest, at which family members, friends, and fellow musicians gathered to share reminiscences and coalesce in fond memorial. Bands appearing included tribute vehicle The Flat Do-Over Jets and Lenny Kaye and Friends.

Over solo years, Dex worked with collaborators including "Crash" Larue and sister Sara. Consistent, though, was roots-genres genuiness -- even if it favored brashly strutting interpretations likely to slap every skull in the place.

Dex's writing was of monumental stature. Fans (who were legion) bore witness to the union of hound dog rhythms and high musical art, as six-string manhandlings made unlikely common cause with majestic passages and august symphonic movements. 

His was a class of one.

Dex's works were tunefully logical within helter-skelter contexts. Throughout floated ghosts lugubrious, stricken, and -- at moments -- jaunty and piano-rolling. It was as if each rising moon ushered an All Hallow's Eve you just couldn't dig enough.

Ethereal intonings, voodoo toms, kitchenware that rattle-clanked like skeletal percussion, and stark word murals clawed away a curtain behind which lurked strange terrains. All rampages were seized up from a familiar Rock'n'Roll cauldron, though accented in unique enunciation.

2023's Good Thing Going (Propeller Sound Recordings) proved to be Dex's final full-length wax. "Dex finds a balance between battered guitars, piano ballads, and reverb-drenched vibes while powered by the inspiration of classic Gospel and soulful R&B," reads Propeller's website description.

The wonderfully incendiary title number features quintessential Dex facets: Gruff vocals on first-name bases with every note on the musical rainbow; mad strumming straight out of a cloudburst; angelic choruses impeccable in grandeur; and determination so all-powerful one can see cords stand out from the author's strained neck.

Instrumental "Andrieux Boogie" does a fancy-footed ragtime promenade with jocular bell tinklings and piano skedaddling. Even those possessed of zero dancing skills will cut the closest rug to shreds.

Some tracks later, Mr. Romweber gave Mann/Weil's chestnut "Shape of Things to Come" crisp animation by asserting trademark boldness.

"Tell Laura I Love Her," a 1960 teen-heartbreak melodrama, was exhumed and revivified with the sincerity of its portrayals of loving-sacrifice and eternal devotion pledge.

The final of 12 cuts, "I Found My Love," unspooled in elegant simplicity. The understated echo on Dex's bottomless vocalizing emphasized the song's vitality. (He plainly knew the subject personally.) Guitar resolutely soldiered forward, its adamance proud.

Dex Romweber's was a funhouse zone in which curiosities, emotionalism, and demolition dive-bombing all held deeds. No one could have gotten out. But then, none of us desired to.

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Propeller Sound Records

Videos: "Juvenile Delinquent" (:38 1987)  "Brazil"    "Jungle Drums"   "Trouble of the World"   Live (2023 acoustic performance 8:49) "Good Thing Going"

North Carolina's Tremors: Primitive Plan 9 Bop

Jimmy Tremor (né Gardner), leader of North Carolina's sigogglin  hillbilly rockers the Tremors, ensured that they varied little over the course of 5 CDs. And the concept stalks yet.

The feral cats howl at the blood moon, from the red clay tobacco roads of America's lost-hick reality. They pitch runaway ruckus like gun-totin' revenuers are sneakin' through the sourwoods.

The string-tied booger men's credibility is beyond dispute. The three have torn up stages with illustrious fellow sons of the soil, including Jerry Lee Lewis, Hasil Adkins, and storied mountain dancer Jesco White.

They've knocked back audiences in both clubs and festivals, the Oneida Rockin' 50s Fest, Nashville Boogie, and Heavy Rebel Weekender numbered among the latter.

The trio was even inducted into the Hillbilly Hall Of Fame. An introductory HHoF post described them as "Hillbilly rock stars" whose "back story includes both zombiefication and alien abduction."

Jimmy now relates that the combo is working up fresh compositions. Before those loom for appreciation, appraisal of previous years' successes is appropriate.

1 - SCOURGE OF THE SOUTH

The debut disc doesn't wipe its feet or cover its coughs. It aptly portrays their helter-skelter personality, and is a rumbustious howdy-hi to Big Beat disciples who hunger for crudely crazed Rebel Sounds. 

Jimmy's manic picking is unerring. It summons a spasmodically jerking regiment of vintage Americana melodies, at once familiar and freshly inebriating.

Besides being gotta-buy wax, Scourge of the South blasted defiant notice that the South was rising again - this time, from beneath soil.

2 - URANIUM ROCK  ep

Venerated sides that Warren Smith and Mack Vickery set loose in days when Sam conspired on Union Ave., came in for cattywampus reanimations amongst Jimmy's own calcium-rattling screeds. 

Too, while his hiccuped yowlings remind of Hasil Adkins and Pat Buttram, they are possessed by singular strains. Jimmy's jittery stumpjumper implorings, punctuated now and again by strangled yelps and white lightning-speed treble note guitar squallings, buckdance athwart plateaus of backwoods psychosis.

The tunes veer twixt marble-orchard mausoleums and mad-doctor Strickfadenery, with insane-in-the-brain vigor. Risen Maila Nurmi and her grieving, old man husband hunt Inspector Clay, while taking care not to bump cardboard plot markers.

3 - INVASION OF THE SAUCERMEN

The trio's riveting creature-bop was by this juncture loved by legions of the finger-popping undead. Sparks-shooting fervor from the B-movie beyond transmogrified backwoods hidey holes into hardwood juke joints. Rotted ghouls, already drunk as Cooter Brown, were in there like June bugs.

Drummer Stretch Armstrong and doghouse dancer Slim Perkins contrive some of the most frenetically rollicking rhythms on offer. They are crucial to the band's schizzing rocketship.

Jimmy's skewed sermons were punctuated now and again by strangled hoots, and reached dizzying heights of blood-freezing tiltedness.

4 - DEMON BOOGIE FEVER

Demon Boogie Fever careened through swerve 'n' stitch territories not found on conventional maps. The basic sound was more pronouncedly hillbilly than before. But what they did with that -- players twisted and contorted it into a strange new entity of unspeakable visage -- accounted for its wonder.

Here resounded stark and freakish hills terror. The slapped-up/stripped-down trio reveled in hectic and gruesomely-technicolored fracture, quaffing B-monster homebrew like they didn't care if it riled the Devil.

"When I was calling around to get the mechanical rights for the cover songs, I called Knox Publishing concerning 'Rock Boppin Baby," Jimmy once recalled. "The man who answered the phone said they didn't handle it there, but was curious about which song I was interested in. When I told him, he said, "That's an old song. I played on that.

"It turns out that I was talking with Roland Janes - I couldn't believe it! He seemed like a very nice, humble guy who had no idea of how extremely important his music really is."

5 - OLD FASHIONED HILLBILLY FEUD

This marks the studio debut of bassman Lowbrow Luke. He charges menu items with double bass navigations that manifest barndance bedlam. The good-time midnight special just barely stays on steel; songs never quite fly from the track, testament to the band's prowess amidst mad tempest.

The title cut and "Cabin Fever" are trademark Tremors: good-timey rampages that flip, flop, and fly off the chicken coop roof. Stretch and Lowbrow wreak assuredly frenetic rhythms that'll knock a mud hole in you and walk it dry.

(And when Jimmy dashes all 'round the fretboard during the fevered cover of "Wreck of the Old '97," you'll swear that he's lost his religion.)

Given the 5 discs considered above, the in-progress material to which Jimmy alluded needs to be in a very special class of reckless crazy. Smart money lets out with a big ol' Yee Haw!