Bottle Rockets on Life in Heartland

The Bottle Rockets make their own brand of heartland rock, part country, part truck-stop boogie. It’s one that refuses to romanticize the everyman existence, and while it’s sometimes loud and rough, the only hint of grunge here is that stuff left under your fingernails after a long day of playing in the garage.

Singer-guitarist Brian Hennemen was in no mood for glamorizing his life back home in Festus, Mo. (pop. 8,100) during the Bottle Rockets’ show at LunaPark on Friday. Standing unshaven in his torn jeans and Motorhead T-shirt, Hennemen drank from a jug of Gatorade and sang of welfare mothers, jealously, cops with radar guns and just getting by.

The band’s abbreviated, 40-minute set focused on material from its most recent album, “The Brooklyn Side.” That meant songs of earnest if sarcastic life lessons of the sort that have earned the quartet a growing cult following since its 1993 debut album.

Lively, expressive melodies usually cut through the Bottle Rockets’ cranked-up guitar sound on Friday, often borrowing from the heavy blues-rock of Lynyrd Skynyrd and the ringing sound of Neil Young & Crazy Horse. Some tunes sometimes grew muddled in the live setting, but one possible explanation was the stomach flu Hennemen said he was battling. Just some more dumb, bad news from real life.