A lot can happen in the course of course of five albums, but thankfully Georgia Warhorse finds Mofro just as (if not more) soulful than they’ve ever been on any of their previous efforts. “Gotta Know” boasts the same swamp-soul piano riffs found on their 2001 debut – Blackwater – and songs like “The Sweetest Thing” and “Slow, Hot, and Sweaty” make good use of the horns that John “JJ” Grey seemed to have found on 2008’s Orange Blossoms. In fact, the biggest change that make have taken place during the band’s rise to roots music stardom probably took place at the expense of the Florida landscape they Grey sings about on his albums’ most poignant cuts.

Grey is Florida as much as Florida is Grey. He was born in the state’s woodsy north and the man who grew up with the nickname “Buckshot” has tracked each of his studio efforts within the walls of St. Augustine’s Retrophonic Studios, which Grey compares to Paris’ Eiffel Tower and the Sistine Chapel in Rome in terms of historical significance. While he paid tribute to the Sunshine State’s geographic beauty on older songs like “Lochloosa” and “Florida”, the 42-year-old Grey has obviously been paying attention to the peninsula’s more subtle details on cuts like “King Hummingbird” and the title track which finds him paying tribute to one of the state’s toughest insects.

While “Georgia Warhorse” is supposed to be about a badass grasshopper, it’s hard to tell whether Grey is talking about the bug or himself when he sings “my shell is hard/my hooks like steel/my wings are fire/and you cannot break my will.” He’s mostly avoided the pitfalls of major label squalor by staying loyal to Alligator (the 39-year-old label that has released Mofro’s last three efforts) and the line “all these years you’ve tried to kill me/boy you ain’t made a dent” comes off like a big, spirited f*** you to all of the slimy A&R reps who have surely tried to lure away Grey from his roots.

The track boasts a grimy, distorted guitar line and is just a mere example of what Grey and his band are capable of live; in fact, the album’s only weakness may be that it could never capture the spirit of the soul revivals that Mofro have put on at legendary Florida venues like the Suwanne Music Park or Skipper’s Smokehouse. While this album’s down-south, Florida strut doesn’t hold a candle to actually watching Grey bust out bars upon bars of some the most gut-wrenching, possessed by the Devil, blues harp one man could ever produce, it surely serves as a sign that Grey is getting better with age – and that the best is yet to come.