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They may not break into "Free Bird" on Wednesday night at Blue Cats, but the three members of local rock band The American Plague are looking to Southern bands like Lynyrd Skynyrd for inspiration these days.

The band, which celebrates the re-release of "God Bless The American Plague" on Wednesday, is in the process of working up tunes for its next album, and Southern rock is a genre the guys are listening to more and more these days.

"Right now, we're digging on some good Southern rock," bassist Dave "Dammit" Hamblin told The Daily Times this week. "I've always been a Skynyrd fan, and (singer) Alex ("Jaw" Weatherly) is really digging on the Allman Brothers right now. And we've always loved Credence Clearwater Revival. We're proud to be from East Tennessee, and the response we've gotten around here is incredible, so we're pumped about doing some new material that reflects our roots."

In the meantime, there's a celebration for "God Bless The American Plague," originally released in January 2005 and picked up by two labels, Dr. Cyclops and Long Live Crime Records. The two labels are releasing the album together, a move that will make it available on a nationwide basis.

The members of The American Plague — Hamblin, guitarist and vocalist Weatherly and drummer Tilmon Navare — have been playing live, both together and in other outfits, for 15 years. Weatherly is a former member of the punk band The Malignmen and the horror-rock trio The Undead; Hamblin co-founded the thrash-metal four-piece Nocturna and Navare tore up Tennessee throughout the 1990s as part of the doom-rock group Galaxie.

The Plague formed in 2001, and although Weatherly and Hamblin are the only remaining original members, the group has remained true to its roots — a viscous musical brew made up of Motorhead, The Stooges, the New York Dolls, Black Sabbath and The Ramones. It's turbo-charged and flammable, and the band's 2001 self-titled EP was just a taste of the thunderous sounds on "God Bless The American Plague."

Local fans have long debated what genre to file the group's music under, but in the end, it's just straight-ahead, testosterone-fueled rock 'n' roll. From the opening chords of "Sympathy for the King," the band peels off one metallic barrage after another. It's not down-tuned doom metal, nor is it head-thrashing speed metal — it is what it is, and from the outset, "God Bless The American Plague," like the band itself, simply rocks.

"To me, it's all about the riffage," Hamblin said. "Forget guitar-shredding — I could care less if I read a full-page spread on us in Guitar Player magazine. I'd rather kick somebody in the nuts with our music and our show combined. We've been hunkered down writing new songs, and we still play out around the region.

"We've got an album's worth of songs ready for the next album, but we're still trying new ideas. We're ready to experiment, and we're trying to branch out and take some risks. We don't want to stagnate, so we're taking some old sounds out, putting some new sounds in and keeping that American Plague energy."

The band will tour starting in November into the early part of 2007, after which the trio hopes to hit the studio, Hamblin said.

"Some of my favorite bands have released their best records right when they come off tour," Hamblin said. "It's like they have a fire under their asses to record something phenomenal, and they're already playing tight because they've been out on the road. That's why we've been writing and writing and writing, so that when the time comes, we can hit the studio with a complete, solid, confident album's worth of material."

In the meantime, the group recently inked a deal to record a split 7-inch record with Weatherly's old band The Undead, and one of the tracks on it may include a song recorded live Wednesday night at Blue Cats.

"We want everybody who shows up to be extra loud for that one," Hamblin added.

The split-7 will be released in Germany, where The Undead is hugely popular and where The American Plague is gaining new fans through marketing tools such as Myspace. Fans from across Europe have written to the band asking the guys to tour there.

"We're grinding our teeth to try to get over there," Hamblin said. "We've had fans from Ireland, Germany, Italy, Scandinavia, France, Spain — people over there are jonesing for it, so we want to get something released over there on a massive scale."