When a musician dresses as a priest, shouts Bible verses, and then wrestles “Satan” before returning to the stage covered in blood, you know you’re in for some unusual music. But what you don’t expect is that the music will be unusually good, as is the case with David Childers and the Modern Don Juans. Their newly released CD, Burning in Hell, underscores the point.

Backed by his son, Robert Childers on drums, and bandmates Mark Lynch on bass (who David Childers credits on the band’s My Space page with also “yelling in the background”) and Randy Saxon on guitar, the band delivers a mix of honky tonk, blues, country, and Tex Mex with some classic rock thrown in. The result is as rollicking a good time as you’ll find outside of Nashville (or for that matter in many clubs in Nashville).

But make no mistake – if you want politically correct lyrics sung by someone with a soft voice and pretty face, look elsewhere. Childers pulls no punches when he uses his gritty voice to sing about death, love, Christianity, ruin, and everything in between. Some critics liken the sound to hard livin’ working man’s 1930’s sounds. When you listen to “Mama,” you can see their point.

I want you to dress me up in street clothes when you take me from my cell I don’t want to meet my maker with that old nasty prison smell Call my mama up down in hell And tell her that her lost boy is coming home

But Childers and the band aren’t one trick ponies. Their repertoire slides from classic country, Tex Mex, blues, and even rock. Consider "Your Crime" which has music and lyrics that could easily fit into a modern rock album.

An evil seed, a bitter crop Your life of crime is gonna come to a stop Drawn and quartered in a public square It’s hard to argue that the game ain’t square

Childers, a North Carolina native and a lawyer by trade, insists in a recent interview with me that his lyrics aren’t biographical but observations from the southern upbringing from which he hails. In the same interview Childers discussed how hopeless the world’s future seems, but he’s always trying “to find some ray of light in there” via his music.

“I don’t understand it,” Childers said of how he expresses those thoughts via such an eclectic mix of music. “You’ve just got to do it. You make it up as you go along.”