It is not clear whether the alias is supposed to be a joke or not, particularly since Murrumbridgee Jones is only a marginal improvement on the artist's real name of Sydneysider Warwick Irwin.
Similarly, it's hard to know how seriously we should take these songs of love, life and murder which are eccentrically described in the album's blurb as "Strong narratives dipped in rich imagery and scratched with a bent nail onto cobwebbed window frames of forgotten hotel rooms that smell of diesel and summer sweat".
It is as if the ghost of Johnny Cash has been reincarnated to take the form of a sozzled Crocodile Dundee-type character. Murrumbidgee Jones, let's just call him MJ, has the slurred tone deaf voice of someone who has stumbled into the recording studio still the worse for wear from the night before.
As MJ was once a writer/producer of an absurdist comedy troupe in Sydney, Australia it's a safe bet that he is singing with his tongue firmly in his cheek.
"I left a man bleeding by a petrol pump", he confesses on Pretty Blue Notes while on Sleeping With The Devil he takes on the persona of a guiltless killer. You half expect him to admit to shooting a man just to watch him die!
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The eleven tunes are a hotchpotch of outlaw country, scat singing, blues, Cajun and boogie-woogie with no single style being embraced with any real conviction.
On Once Upon A Time a woozy accordion accompanies a nostalgic trip through a life lived on the margins in which spitting on wounds and tasting your own blood are presented as secrets of longevity.
A boozy lifestyle is celebrated in Bottle of Rum (Zeno's Pizza Bar) and the consequences of such excess are related in My Doctor Told Me.
MJ's line is to mock any sensible advice and to set up stall as an unrepentant barroom philosopher recommending the hair of the dog as a cure-all.
Musically he and his cohorts are little more than a novelty act mistily viewing the world through the bottom of a glass.
Murrumbidgee Jones' website
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