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Cracker's most ambitious album

After 25 years together American rockers Cracker are set to release their most ambitious album. Berkeley to Bakersfield is the Californian band's first double album, made up of two themed discs each inspired by the vastly different musical landscapes of the titular cities.

Best known for their 1993 fringe grunge album Kerosene Hat and its hit single Low, Cracker reunited the band that wrote and recorded that album for the opening disc of Berkeley to Bakersfield, their 10th album. Nestled in the San Francisco Bay Area, Berkeley represents the punk, garage and soul music of the region, as well as its liberal politics.

"You can't help but be influenced by the geography and the music surrounding you," guitarist Johnny Hickman, 58, says from Colorado, where he's lived since 2004.

"That area's been associated with first the flower power movement and later it was a big punk stronghold with bands like the Dead Kennedys. But there was a soul influence too, bands like War and Sly and the Family Stone, so there's a bit of that on the Berkeley record as well."

The second disc, Bakersfield, represents what singer David Lowery, 54, describes as the band's "California country" side. Despite their Americana roots, it's still surprising to hear the band go full country, with pedal steel and fiddle on tracks such as King of Bakersfield and California Country Boy.

"We've always had that thread of country music in there," Hickman explains. "We'll mix Merle Haggard with Led Zeppelin if we feel like it - it's the way we roll.

"This time, instead of mashing those styles together we decided to record it with two different sets of musicians and make two records. It's not a double album in the sense that we had that many songs, it's a double album with two bands."

Originally finding fame with their self-titled 1992 debut album, Cracker were an anomaly in the grunge-dominated musical landscape of the time. An alternative rock band with a signature twang, in many ways they predated the success of alt-country that was still to come.

"We came up at the same time as Nirvana and Soundgarden but we didn't sound too much like them," Hickman recalls. "Punk rock and country sounds like an odd mixture but it worked for us."