Matthew Grimm & the Red Smear

Thundering out of the heartland like twenty thousand midwestern mongols -- that is, polite mongols, who stop to swap insurance information -- Matthew Grimm & The Red Smear are Iowa's newest bastards of rock & roll and the sworn enemies of all things genteel and orthodox. Grimm, with the venerable guidance of producer/guitarist Pete Anderson, underscores that with the subtlety of a clown-hammer in the blistering, vulgar, impolite record, Dawn's Early Apocalypse, his first since departing New York, and the pseudo-legendary band he co-founded, The Hangdogs, for his native Iowa.

Based in Iowa City, the Red Smear plays ass-rattling rock meat-grindered with hefty doses of power pop, punk and habaneros. Fueling the band's attack are Grimm's foul-mouthed disdain for a whored and corporatized status quo and disrespect for everything august and sacred, which prompted the Iowa City Press-Citizen to call him the ?hardest-hitting leftfielder this side of Manny Ramirez.?