Everything about Tami Neilson is a throwback— from her beehive hairdo to the faded glam-shot artwork of her new album, CHICKABOOM! Even the ad copy that appears under the album title, anointing her “The Hot Rockin’ Lady of Country, Rockabilly & Soul,” seems to promise something like an old-timey magic trick; a costumed conjuring of something you’d typically only see at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. But anyone expecting museum memorabilia or nostalgic wish fulfillment has never heard the hot rockin’ lady sing. While it’s true that CHICKABOOM! dazzles in its retro chic, at times suggesting a stylish soundtrack to an imagined Quentin Tarantino film, the music is just too loud, too raucous, too electric to ever sound like a relic. Wherever Neilson does her thing, no dust can settle, no cobwebs can form.

CHICKABOOM! isn’t a nostalgia play so much as a reinvigoration of classic tropes— a combustible cross-pollination of Wanda Jackson riffs, Patsy Cline waterworks, Bo Diddley thunder, and, on “Any Fool with a Heart,” soft-touch uptown pop. All of it’s presented not with an archivist’s academic caution, but with a stage actress’ dramatic flair and a garage band’s appetite for destruction. It feels very much like the right kind of album for Neilson to make following 2018’s superb SASSAFRASS!, which went deep and wide and showed the full range of what she’s capable of. Her virtuosity indisputable, Neilson can now turn her attention to just blowing shit up, which is kinda what CHICKABOOM! feels like: A box of fireworks, where the singer lights one short fuse after another and lets these songs burn fast and bright in a blaze of snarling guitars and crackling drums. It’s almost like a jukebox singles record, where there’s never a dull moment and only a couple of songs that push past three minutes; in the longest, “When You Were Mine,” Neilson uses the full three-and-a-half minute runway to mine maximum existential anguish from her Muscle Shoals hotbox. More representative of the album’s spring-loaded mayhem is “Hey Bus Driver!,” a concentrated dose of thumping toms, barbed-wire guitar riffs, and punchy Sun Records primitivism. 

Neilson grew up touring and singing in a family band, showbiz experience that’s always been her secret weapon: She’s got obvious natural talent but also knows how to sing with clarity and precision, how to hit her marks, how to work a crowd. “When You Were Mine” is the showstopper, the one where Neilson starts in the low embers of the blues and builds to in-the-red catharsis, putting her vocal cords straight through the shredder as she howls in anguish. It’s a controlled eruption, and a stark contrast to the nonchalant opener “Call Your Mama,” where Neilson sends an unworthy dude packing, brandishing sneers and snarls like a showboating gunslinger. She’s also unafraid to ham it up sometimes, cackling her way through “Ten Tonne Truck,” about a successful woman laughing all the way to the bank. (“HA HA HA!”)

The album’s 10 little bottle rockets— originals, once again written with brother Jay, who also sings and plays on the album— address concerns that never go out of style: Love, heartbreak, hard work, the open road, money and its absence. The heartbreak songs are imaginative: “16 Miles of Chain” is a hardscrabble drama where love is literal imprisonment, while “You Were Mine” looks to a formative loss as an event that cleaved time in two. But Neilson is at her best, her toughest, her prickliest when she’s singing about her hustle, as she does in “Ten Tonne Truck,” about the alchemic formula of luck and grit required to make big bucks in Nashville. Speaking of which, it wouldn’t be a Tami Neilson album without a few choice words about the absence of women on today’s country charts, something she takes care of with mirthless one-liners in “Queenie, Queenie.” The same song gets to another of her core strengths, which is embodying a feminism that ennobles domesticity and leaves plenty of room for working mothers. “What’s a stay-at-home mom do with all that time?” she deadpans as the bills and dirty dishes pile up, drums clattering like a ticking timebomb or a Jeopardy! buzzer. That song is a pressure cooker, but there’s release in “Sister Mavis,” a pentecostal rave-up where Neilson rides high atop handclaps and jangling tambourines, espousing a holy canon where synoptic gospels share space with Mavis Staples, Sister Rosetta, and Mahila Jackson. There’s nothing stuffy or forced about its hero worship: Like the rest of CHICKABOOM!, it uses the past as a powder keg; the first spark of a righteous ruckus.