Apocalypse Later Music Reviews: blues rock

Showing posts with label blues rock. Show all posts

Wednesday, 19 February 2025

10 Slip - Tense Lip (2025)

Country: Canada
Style: Blues/Stoner Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 7 Feb 2025
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | YouTube

This came to me as blues rock and that's not entirely unfair, being built on blues guitar, but it's not the primary genre I heard. What is depends on which track I'm listening to, because it spans quite a range, not all of it sitting on a straight musical line.

When it starts out with Dead Ain't Gonna Cry, it's heavy blues rock with a fuzzy guitar right out of stoner rock. It's heavy and raucous and surprisingly patient. The vocals in the second half build the live feel that we notice immediately in how hard the drums are being hit. That goes double for the end of the song, which is almost bludgeoning stoner rock. This continues into Cult but with far less intensity. The musicians are playing just as hard and the song is just as patient but it's slower and sparser stoner rock that's stripped down to almost garage rock levels. This counts as the bluesiest rock song on that album but it never cuts loose to jam.

If that gives you a pretty good idea of what 10 Slip sound like, the next few will surely shake that up considerably. 10 Split starts out like Nick Cave singing for a doom pop outfit, but it grows into a Red Hot Chili Peppers direction with plenty of punk attitude in the combatitive vocals during the second half. It's a greased up and dirty song that doesn't want to be clean and, while 10 Slip are a Canadian band, hailing from Sydney, Nova Scotia, there's an Australian feel here that extends far beyond Cave. There's some of Angry Anderson's confrontational attitude here, though the style doesn't come close to Rose Tattoo.

The most fascinating songs on the album come next. The Wall, all nine minutes of it, is rooted in a prog metal feel but filtered firmly away from metal, as if 10 Slip are Tool moonlighting as a stoner rock band covering new wave songs in weird time signatures. There's King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard here too, to keep that Aussie feel alive. I've never felt that Canadian and Australian music had much in common until now, but 10 Slip seem happy to be the causeway between them.

Then there's Shallow Waters, which is a story song, a deep vocal accompanied by a batch of power beats, maybe explaining that's why there's more Nick Cave here and even alt country. This one is happy to flaunt an outlaw flavour, refusing to kowtow to any genre's expectations, even alt rock, a sprawling genre that ultimately fits this best, whatever rich resonance the vocals find. The second half ramps up in intensity so that voice can leap into street preacher mode, underlining that Cave influence even more. And given all of that, it still has a real garage rock simplicity to it. It's quite the song.

I despise talking through albums in order, but this one seems to naturally fall that way: the pair of openers to set a particular expectation, 10 Split to shatter it, then The Wall and Shallow Waters to showcase just how diverse 10 Slip are with arguably the best and most memorable couple of songs on the album.

The remaining three don't need to be talked about in order, because they're simply another three songs to deepen that versatility, but I guess I might as well finish how I started, after pointing out that the vocals and guitars come courtesy of Brandon Hoban, while the other couple of musicians are Cameron Walker and Gregor MacDougall, even if I can't tell you who plays the heavy bass and who hits those drums like his life depends on it. Just check out his playing on Spore.

The final three are less notable tracks but they're still enjoyable. Mirrors goes back to stoner rock, but ups the ante into some agreable fast doom. Hallowed Ground, which is the single, is somehow the one song I never seem to write a note about. It's too deep to be truly mellow, but it works that way anyway and plays out slower and more melodically than anything else here, though it doesn't stay mellow all the way, that commanding Cave-esque shout of Hoban returning to lead into a sort of stoner rock knees up to finish. And then Spore, somehow the longest track here, even with The Wall lasting nine minutes, closes out like a stoner rock jam.

I believe this is a debut album, though 10 Slip did put out a five track EP in 2023 called Blackbeer'd that looks like something Alestorm might knock out, all pirates and booze. It's a strong album and I look forward to the next one.

Monday, 6 January 2025

Little Feat - Sam's Place (2024)

The latest in a long string of bands who I had no idea were still together and releasing new music are Little Feat, who were founded back in 1969 in Los Angeles by alumni of Frank Zappa's band like Lowell George. They were talked up often by people whose voices I trusted, like Tommy Vance and Ian Gillan, both of whom played tracks by them on the Friday Rock Show, like Skin It Back and Dixie Chicken, but I could have sworn that they'd gone away before I found rock music in 1984 and they'd done that, splitting up in 1979, shortly before George died. What I missed was that the surviving members reformed in 1987 and they've been together ever since.

Back then, that meant five musicians, but time has whittled them down to three and Sam Clayton takes the mike throughout this album for the first time. The other two are Kenny Gradney on bass and Bill Payne on keyboards. Fred Tackett joined the band at the point of reformation in 1987 and guitarist Scott Sharrard and drummer Tony Leone are recent arrivals. The other reason that I have been blissfully unaware that Little Feat kept on rolling is that they haven't put out a studio album since 2012's Rooster Rag. As that featured songs by Mississippi John Hurt and Willie Dixon, maybe it pointed the way to this being fundamentally a blues album, albeit one that rocks.

Milkman is pure blues with a lovely groove. Clayton's vocals are delightfully characterful and the guitar solo is absolutely gorgeous. However, that's immediately outshone by my favourite track on the album, You'll Be Mine, which simply barrels along with punctuating horns, a lovely slide guitar and another quality guitar solo at the end. Third up is a stalker of a song, Long Distance Call, with a guest vocal appearance by Bonnie Raitt, a sleepy harmonica-driven vibe and old school country guitarwork. That's three different blues styles in three songs and they're all excellent. Little Feat have my attention.

They play with the tempo for a while, up for You'll Be Mine, down for Long Distance Call, up again for the rocking blues Don't Go No Further, down once more for Can't Be Satisfied and down again for Last Night. However, everything that follows goes back to Can't Be Satisfied to work in a more consistent style. There's a real bounce to Can't Be Satisfied that guarantees to make us move. The vocals are sassy, the harmonica follows suit and so does the rest of the album, in Why People Like That and especially Mellow Down Easy, which features two fantastic solos, one on harmonica and the other on guitar.

Nothing tops You'll Be Mine in my book, but Why People Like That comes close. It's a message song with a spectacularly simple message, pointing out that people do bad things and wondering why. The title is a question, even if it's shorn of punctuation, and we can't answer that question by the end of the song any more than Clayton can. Both are lively songs and, while this is studio work all the way through to the bonus track, a live rendition of the Muddy Waters standard Got My Mojo Working, it always has that live feel to it as if the band are just jamming in the studio. That's most obvious on the bouncy songs, of course, but there are two other reasons.

One is that Clayton's voice is gorgeous but deliberately unpolished. He's trying to sound dirty not clean and he manages it. We imagine that he's even older than his seventy-eight years, singing to us from a rocking chair on his porch. It's perfect for this material. The other is the solos, which just keep on coming. None of these songs are long, Last Night a breath shy of five minutes and the rest shorter, down to the sub-three minutes of Don't Go No Further, but they all have solos, often more than one. Everyone seems to get in on that action too, so it's not just the guitars; the harmonica gets a few and so do do the keyboards, Bill Payne especially rocking out on Last Night.

This is a joyous album. It may be that, over time, a slow song like Last Night might seem a little in the way amongst all the lively material, but I'm still loving every single track three times through and I'll be diving straight into a fourth. Now I need to check back to see what else Little Feat have been up to since their 1987 reformation. I see a huge amount of albums, but most of them are live. I'll have to figure out which are studio and see how they changed their sound across that span. But not yet. I'm listening to this again.

By the way, the album's called Sam's Place because it was recorded at Sam Phillips Recording, one of the most legendary studios in Memphis. The songs are mostly standards, even if a few were new to me, with Milkman the only original. You'll Be Mine and Mellow Down Easy are two of three that were written by Willie Dixon, so I should clearly dig deeper into his catalogue than I have thus far. Why People Like That is a Bobby Charles song, a white musician who pioneered swamp pop. I don't know his work well, though I have heard some of his more famous compositions, like See You Later, Alligator and (I Don't Know Why) But I Do.

Monday, 9 September 2024

Los Lonely Boys - Resurrection (2024)

Country: USA
Style: Rock
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 2 Aug 2024
Sites: Facebook | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia

Los Lonely Boys is made up of three brothers, the Garzas, and this is called Resurrection because it's a reunion. When Jojo Garza left in 2019, they went on hiatus, but he came back in 2022 and so they're back in business again. As they hadn't released an album for a few years before that split, this ninth album comes a decade after its predecessor. It's not only a good one, it's an agreeably versatile one, as fans might expect, because they're well known for combining rock 'n' roll, blues, country, soul and Tex-Mex into a commercial sound all their own.

The surprising song for me was the opener, Wish You Would, because the obvious influence here is the Beatles, who didn't venture much into the genres listed above. It's a rock song more than pop, but it's written exactly like Lennon and McCartney would write it and there are whole sections of music simply drenched in the Merseyside sound.

As if to counter that, it's followed by I Let You Think That You Do, which is far more ZZ Top, not just rock over pop with a powerful guitar solo, but firmly rooted in the blues and obviously flavoured with the Lone Star state. This is a song that you simply can't imagine originating from any other location, launched with harmonica and unfolding with pure Texas dirt. It wouldn't shock me if they recorded this outside in the desert with nothing in sight except for tumbleweeds and armadillos stomping their toes, except that I think they really moved all those into a roadhouse and recorded it there instead.

Much of what follows sits in between those two sounds, at least until we get to the majestic closer, Bloodwater, which returns us firmly to the blues.

Initially, it's lively in a party sense, a string of songs that are easy to dance to and often shift into a Spanish verse or two. Dance with Me is sassy and soulful, a quintessential Latin song, right down to strong brass and a Cuban beat. It takes a lot to not move to this one and, with different filters, it could be a Latin pop single. Send More Love is a textbook example of laid back country rock, with a timely hook in "This world is going crazy! Can you send more love?" Natural Thing is an engaging ballad, with a strong guitar.

As we move into the second half, things remain lively but shift more into rock 'n' roll, starting with Can't Get No Love, which is such straightforward piano and guitar driven rock 'n' roll that Elvis has to have sung it at some point. Painted Memories adds a strong dose of Latin flavour and country too, but remains just as fundamentally rooted in rock 'n' roll. Hooked on You is as different again as it can be without ever leaving that genre, sassing it up into a punchy pop rock song.

In between those three is See Your Face, which is a smoocher of a song even though it's not overt ballad material. The ladies have been dancing all the way through, but they will drag in their men for this one. But hey, let's leap past that and relish in the closer.

Bloodwater is a soft blues song with a very tasty intro indeed, shifting from dirty into smooth with effortless charm. It's somewhere in between Jeff Healey and the Neville Brothers, I think, with an excellent and patient organ providing the perfect backdrop. There are a number of strong guitar solos on this album, including on I Let You Think That You Do and Natural Thing, but this leaves all of them in the dust. This isn't just a Henry Garza solo, it's a magnetic gem, somehow laid back but still soaring, more B. B. King than Stevie Ray Vaughan. It's the jewel in an already glorious song, easily my favourite song, ahead of the very different pairing of I Let You Think That You Do and Dance with Me.

It's also a patient closer. Everything on this album is three minutes and change except for the final two tracks, because Hooked on You wraps up just a little early and this one stretches out into five langurous minutes. Of course, it has to be the final song, because nothing can follow it, except for a decision to listen to the whole album over again. Which I'm about to do once more. This is a good album by any criteria but it's an especially good return for a band who have been out of the studio for ten years and on hiatus for a few of those. Welcome back!

Monday, 20 November 2023

Robin Trower featuring Sari Schorr - Joyful Sky (2023)

I've reviewed a Robin Trower album this year already, but No More Worlds to Conquer came out in April 2022 and I trawled it into my traditional January catch-up of what I missed from the previous year. This one's new, from late October, and it's a very different beast to its predecessor. Of course, the focal point of all Trower's solo albums is his guitarwork but that 2022 album felt like an album of guitar with some token vocals; few songs felt like they were written as songs. This one feels like it was written as much for Sari Schorr's voice as for Trower's guitar.

And, in most instances, I think it was. Trower and Schorr share the same manager, Alan Robinson, who suggested that the former write a song for the latter. Liking what he heard, he chose instead to rework I Will Always Be Your Shelter for her voice. That was the closer on No Worlds to Conquer and it's the closer here too, but they're very different songs. There it was a ballad, a smooth one that gave Richard Watts plenty of opportunity to be tender and some to be raw and honest. Here, it's more spiritual in nature and Schorr is far more vehement, showing the hurt inside, to grab an important line from the lyrics.

After that song, this collaboration became a given and there are ten songs here to explore what a pair of musicians can do together. I say a pair, because I can't find any details about who else might be playing on it. Certainly, the usual instruments are here, but I don't know who's responsible. On that prior album, Trower played the bass himself in addition to guitar, but I doubt he also took on organ and drums, especially given that Chris Taggart has played the latter on his last few albums. But hey, I don't know. All I know is that I didn't and that's a good thing.

My favourite song here may be the opener, Burn, which is a real tease of a song. It's about trying to calm down a partner and the two participants we know play those characters. Schorr is infusing it with a smouldering fire and Trower's doing the calming, so much that he's almost minimal as it begins. It has to be said that he's aware that there's something of his classic work from the seventies on this album and this has the achingly slow pace and flow of Bridge of Sighs, even though the guitarwork is very different indeed. It's a peach of a song.

I'll Be Moving On and The Distance are more upbeat blues songs, relatively traditional but with a smoky small club vibe courtesy of Schorr. It's easy to imagine walking down the street in Memphis or any American city known for its live blues and catch snippets of this sort of thing and be enticed into a thousand different small blues clubs. Of course, few of the bands playing that music have as much abiding power as Trower and Schorr but that's just quality, not style.

The next song that stood out for me was Peace of Mind, which has a more distorted guitar. It's slow and heavy, almost an old school heavy metal song that's been stripped down and rearranged for a blues band. I could easily hear a stoner rock band speeding it back up and upping the amplification to bury us in fuzz. Other highlights are Change It, which is a funkier, more R&B song; the title track, if mostly because of its stellar guitar solo; and The Circle is Complete, which builds wonderfully, in part due to some excellent bass work. It feels like a big song from the outset but it has to grow into that over seven minutes, truly starting to do so about halfway.

And then there's I Will Always Be Your Shelter. I'm not the biggest fan of this sort of song, but I did list it as one of my highlights on No More Worlds to Conquer and I really ought to do that here too. It keeps growing on me like a rash. It's also a different enough song to everything else to stand out but not different enough to feel out of place. It's almost like a subtle punctuation mark to end the album and, in doing so, change the meaning of the whole thing. What we might think of the album might come down to what punctuation mark we think this song is. It might be an exclamation mark or even a question mark, but I think I'll take it as an em dash. Trower may be half a century into his solo career at this point but, despite the title of the previous album, he's clearly not done.

Tuesday, 13 June 2023

Dirty Deep - Trompe l'œil (2023)

Country: France
Style: Blues Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 7 Apr 2023
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube

It would be easy to call Dirty Deep a blues rock band, as indeed I did above, but this fifth album by them is a magnificently versatile affair and, while it's all built on the blues, it also ventures into a lot of other realms. The other common threads are a simplicity of approach, which sometimes has them sound like a garage rock band recording in one blissful take, and a rough attitude, which has the effect of lending them an edge of punk and outlaw country.

Given that, I'm not sure if Broken Bones is a good opener or not. It's a good song, but it's a teaser of some of what's to come rather than a stormer to grab us in. It stubbornly refuses to speed up to the tempo it could easily be played at, but it sets a tasty tone and there's an emotional harmonica pleading with us to stay the course. It begins beautifully, a solo voice over chords so quiet we have to stretch to hear them but which build until the song explodes into action.

There are up tempo songs here, most obviously Shoot First, which absolutely blisters along, as if a band happy to shuffle along in third gear suddenly find top gear and, liking the sensation, floor it. It's garage rock with a serious punk attitude, though it never quite loses the blues, especially with another tasty harmonica solo from guitarist and lead vocalist Victor Sbrovazzo. It's a song to take your breath away and it stands out all the more at the heart of the album, a seventh out of fifteen tracks, because of the two around it.

Before it is From Tears, an acoustic ballad that's sweet and open and embracing. This is Dirty Deep playing the blues with a folky country vibe. It's a beautiful song and a subtle one, moving as much through swells of what I presume are keyboards doing the job of strings as anything else. There is a drummer in the band, Geoffroy Sourp, but he doesn't do anything on this one, unless he also has a responsibility behind the keyboards. What rhythm the song has comes from its guitar.

After it is Donoma, easily the tastiest piece on the album but another subtle one. It takes over a minute to conjure up an atmosphere with what sounds like a cello, then effortlessly turns into the sort of progressive roots song that we might not expect on an album so buried in the simplicity of garage rock and especially after the blitzkrieg that is Shoot First. However, it's here and it shines a bright light with plenty of gospel in it. These are three thoroughly different songs but each is well worth your attention because they're all highlights.

While I'm all about the middle of this album, the half before it is a notch above the one after, but I wouldn't divide them quite like that. The first has Juke Joint Preaching, a laid back number in the style of the Black Crowes with all sorts of little touches that sell it more than the big sweep. It has Don't Be Cruel, which follows suit but also finds a mellow vibe midway with a saxophone. It has the wonderful instrumental harmonica interlude called Hipbreak III, a tease of a shift into a stalker of a song in What Really Matters with Sbrovazzo roaring out his lyrics.

So the first side is strong, but the second has Your Name with an almost reggae beat, a light touch compared to so many songs that have a semblance of darkness to them. It has Hold On Me, a truly back to basics garage rock stomp to stir the blood. It sounds like Sourp only has one drum on this one but he's especially happy to beat the crap out of it just for us. It also has Waiting for a Train, a brief country song that even finds room for a yodel, and a slow, extra laid back closer in Medicine Man, driven by a sparing slide guitar, which combines impeccably with a sparing harmonica. However, it also has a song called Never Too Late that's just there, a routine blues rocker with alternative touches.

The result is an excellent and sublimely surprising album. I haven't heard Dirty Deep before, but I have every intention of hearing them again. It's been a while since they released an album, though they did get through the COVID years with an album of raw unplugged sessions and a mini-album of odd covers, each featuring a different guest. It's been five years since Tillandsia in 2018, but the first four arrived in only seven. Here's to hoping they're back on a regular sort of schedule with an admirable versatility ready to roll into future material.

Wednesday, 17 May 2023

Smokey Mirror - Smokey Mirror (2023)

Country: USA
Style: Heavy Psychedelic Blues Rock
Rating: 9/10
Release Date: 5 May 2023
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram

Boy, have I been waiting for this album. The last gig I went to before COVID closed everything down was a psychedelic blues rock band from Dallas, Texas called Smokey Mirror and it's no hyperbole to suggest that they were the most devastating live band I've ever seen. What made that even more special was that they were technically there in support of local stoner metal band Loserfur and the venue, which was about the size of my front room, wasn't full and largely included members of the other three bands on the bill. My brief gig review on Facebook stated that "they gave it everything like they were playing in front of 20,000 people who had paid $200 to get in, rather than 35 people for $8 cover".

They were a trio then, with only an EP out, but they've bulked up to a four piece—Cam Martin has replaced Josh Miller on drums and Caleb Hollowed has stepped in on a second guitar—and signed with Rise Above Records. That's important because this band generated a sound that was hard to believe was generated by only three people and there are now four of them. Along with the boost in production values that comes with an important label, this ought to seriously blister and it very much does that, aided I believe by engineer Paul Middleton, formerly of seventies heavy rock band Blackhorse, also a trio, who did his thing at a studio that uses only vintage analogue equipment.

The result is that this feels authentically seventies, the sort of ultimate crate digger find, surely an album lost in obscurity because nobody could believe how intense it was in 1975. Imagine the most furious psychedelic rock from that decade, drench it in acid and stretch it out for forty minutes and change and you might have an idea what Smokey Mirror sound like. I thought of them on stage as a cross between Aeroblus and Black Sabbath, with some of Motörhead's ruthless heaviness and an intricacy from the Allman Brothers. That translated well to the studio, though there's not as much of the Motörhead as I remember.

They tellingly start with a crescendo, pause a moment and then launch into full gear with Invisible Hand, a song from their debut EP. There are three songs here that are previously released but all benefit from being re-recorded here, not just because of the production but because they're even tighter as a band now than they were, which is hard to imagine. The others are Magick Circle, also from that EP, and A Thousand Days in the Desert, which saw release as a single. All three are on a compilation CD I picked up from the band in 2019 which combined the EP, the single and a further song as a bonus.

Invisible Hand is a killer opener, an ambitious statement of intent, and Pathless Forest matches its intensity but with more obvious melodic lines. Both these songs blister, but Magick Circle blisters a lot harder, which is saying something. It ran to six minutes on the EP but it's eight here, even with a faster pace. The first four minutes there are done in three here, with a neat slower section before some feedback worship wrapped around a bass solo, and, eventually, of all things, a drum solo. It's a ballsy move to include a drum solo on a debut album, but it works because Magick Circle is easily defined as a showcase. The only thing more ballsy would be to kick off the album with it.

From there, it's new material for a while and wildly varied new material at that. I believe they put out Alpha-State Dissociative Trance as a single, which is fantastic because it's particularly wild and full of jazz fusion. It's a jagged and vicious sub-three minute blitzkrieg to cleanse our palates after an eight minute epic with a drum solo and, just in case we needed to cleanse our palates after that level of intensity, Fried Vanilla Spider Trapeze is old school roots rock, only a minute long but music that wouldn't be out of place on a Hot Tuna album. Nice harmonica too.

My favourite song here has to be Sacrificial Altar, another epic workout with a crescendo to start it into motion. I didn't know what Smokey Mirror meant when I saw them live, but then I read Ernest Hogan's books, especially Smoking Mirror Blues, and now I get it. It's a reference to the Aztec god Tezcatlipoca, their trickster deity, and, while Los Tricksters were a fictional band in Hogan's novel, it's not a wild stretch to imagine that they sound like Smokey Mirror playing Sacrificial Altar. It's a gem of a track, short at seven and a half minutes, and more perfectly formed than anything before it.

And, while that's enough for an 8/10 album already, we're not done yet. What's to Say underline a Black Sabbath influence, just in case we hadn't noticed it during much of the album thus far, but it does it at Sabbath's speed here, slow and doomladen, before the bass goes hyperactive and both guitars start to shred psychedelia. It's another strong song on an album full of strong songs and it has to be said that I wanted that to carry on forever. However, this avoids overstaying its welcome by wrapping up with a brief Latin solo guitar exploration called Recurring Nightmare.

And, because I can, I can then just start the album again. And again. And again. I've been eagerly awaiting this album for four years and it showed up better than even I expected it to be. Now I just need to stop listening to it on repeat because I have other albums to review.

Wednesday, 29 March 2023

Peter Storm & The Blues Society - Second (2023)

Country: Portugal
Style: Blues Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 10 Mar 2023
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | YouTube

This band aren't remotely what they seem, which is not a bad thing. The one thing that the cover is clear about is that they're a four piece blues band and a good one as well. However, they're not an American band or indeed a British one, which seems to cover the majority of blues rock bands even today. They hail from Porto in Portugal, even though they sing in very clear English. And that's not because the very Anglo sounding Peter Storm happens just moved there, because Peter Storm has no part to play in this band, unless he's the dog on the cover. The vocalist and guitarist who clearly leads the Blues Society is João Belchior.

However, while he has a rich and warm voice with excellent inflection and he has plenty of time for his guitarwork to shine, Bino Ribeiro steals the album out from him only twenty-three seconds in. It's guitar that kicks off Write Down the Blues, though very possibly Ribeiro's rhythm guitar, but a few bars later, it's his harmonica that takes over. It's not omnipresent here, because Ribeiro has a percussion credit on top of those other two roles, but whenever it manifests, it's immediately the sound of the album for me.

For a while, there's a pattern in play. The Blues Society start out with a storming rocking blues and then slow it right down with a slow blues song, and they keep that alternation throughout the first half of the album. Write Down the Blues is the first rocker, just to get us in the mood, and Blame is the first slow blues, with a tasty groove, an elegant guitar and a haunting harmonica. Every time I start to think about how good Belchior is, Ribeiro wanders in and steals my attention right back. It would be fair to call Blame one of my favourites, a creeper of a piece with a Mark Knopfler vibe to the vocals and sometimes the guitar too.

Go Down and Play shifts back from subtle to blatant as a sassy up tempo piece even if it isn't quite the rocker Write Down the Blues was. It's more inexorable and there's that squealing harmonica to make me grin like a madman again. Then Meditation Blues lives up to its title, another slow but tasty piece. And, because you're seeing the pattern, the gloriously titled I Feel Like Breaking Up Somebody's Home Tonight ramps things back up again, adding some talkbox that works, even if it grounds the song in the seventies. What are the odds that 52nd Avenue will be a slow blues song?

Well, it isn't, just to mess with our minds, and the pattern shifts over the second half. However the songs order though, there are clearly two modes that the Blues Society mine well. The best of the rockers are early, I think, Write Down the Blues setting a high bar from the outset. However, when it comes to slow blues, all these songs resonate. Blame is an early highlight but I Told You (Not to Treat Me Wrong) may be even better. Never mind Mark Knopfler, this one trawls in Peter Green in especially its vocal approach and some in the guitarwork too.

The question I can't help but ask myself is which is the better approach of the two but I haven't got much reason to answer it. They do both well and even if, over a few listens, I might start to favour a few of the slow blues numbers over their rocking peers, I have no interest in being picky. In either mode, the songs succeed for the same reasons: Belchior's guitar (and, a little behind it, his vocals) and Ribeiro's harmonica. And even if I favour the latter without hesitation, the songs where it fails to show up at all succeed too. Just check out the delicate guitar solo that constitutes the first half of the second half of Meditation Blues. A harmonica wouldn't add anything to this piece because it's all it needs to be with that guitar. And, hey, it's all the more glorious when it shows back up on the talking blues, 52nd Avenue.

I'd have liked to have heard José Reis's bass more, but he's not interested in being flash. He stays back in the mix adding texture to the songs for the most part, though he dominates the early part of I Feel Like Breaking Up Somebody's Home Tonight. The remaining member of the band is Jorge Oliveira, who goes by Mister Shuffle, and he's a thoroughly reliable drummer who's exacty where he needs to be in the mix. He doesn't seem to shine initially but, the more we get used to what the album does, the more he stands out on repeat listens. He does a lot more on Blame than we think on our first listen. Everyone here is excellent.

I guess there's one more thing that the cover is honest about and that's that Second is the second Peter Storm & The Blues Society album. I bet you can't guess what their first was called! Of course you can and that means that you already know what title they'll slap onto the next one.

Thursday, 16 March 2023

Özgür Aydın - Harvest (2023)

Country: Turkey
Style: Blues Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 17 Mar 2023
Sites: Bandcamp

This is going to seem like easy listening after ...and Oceans and the sweater Özgür Aydın's wearing on the cover doesn't help—no, I'm not judging, because I covet both those chairs—but it's perfect as a palate cleanser. It's bluesy but it feels uplifting and song titles like Joy, Harvest and Circle of Energy feel entirely appropriate. It's also entirely instrumental, because Aydın is a guitarist—not to be confused with the concert pianist of the same name—and he sees his job as conjuring moods out of his guitar. I could easily see some of these pieces being used on soundtracks.

It actually starts out lighter than it ends up, because there's a long intro to Earth Mother to set us in a calm frame of mind before Aydın's electric guitar joins in around the minute mark. From that point, we're firmly in the vibe of the album and the rest continues in much the same vein. It's soft music but it has substance and it feels delightful. For comparisons, I'd suggest Mark Knopfler with no hesitation, but there's some Dave Gilmour in there too. Like them, Aydın is economical with his notes but he plays and manipulates all the ones that need to be there to do the job at hand.

Earth Mother is a decent opener, enough to keep me listening, but I found myself enjoying this all the more as it ran on. From Earth Mother to Air and Water—if you're waiting for fire, you'll be out of luck—and a more thoughtful piece. Much of what Aydın does is introspective, but this one has a story arc like, say, Knopfler's Going Home, and the backing emphasises its build well. I should add that this isn't just solo guitar; someone, maybe Aydın himself, is playing bass and drums, often keyboards as well. I can't find credits online, only the suggestion that there isn't a standing band behind him.

What's important about the backing musicians, whoever they are, is that they rarely seek out the spotlight, content to accompany Aydın in relatively simple fashion, a clear contrast to the guitar, which has plenty to say. Also, the backing tracks don't vary much from track to track, so leaving the guitar full control to change the tone, mood or anything else. For instance, Aydın is vehement on Land, in the sense that he's more forceful with the strings rather than playing faster or heavier. I heard a lot of what Robbie Blunt did on Robert Plant's Big Log on this one.

For a while, every track seems to be better than the last, but Food plays more like an extension to Land than the next track. I like Land so much that I'm not sure I'd put anything else here above it, but Circle of Energy is exactly what it suggests and it gets me every time. It's certainly the perkiest piece on the album, with a real bounce in its step. Joy follows it well, even if it just stops when its time is up, and that leaves the title track to close out, which is oddly the shortest piece on offer.

In fact, not only is Harvest the track the shortest on Harvest the album, but the latter feels a little skimpy, only just sneaking past twenty five minutes. I don't know if it's being considered an album or just a mini-album, not that it particularly matters except that if it's advertised as the former, I would have preferred a few more tracks tacked onto the end. Aydın has a pleasant laid back style that's very easy to listen to, so he could easily get away with longer albums than many far better known guitarists who impress wildly but only in smaller doses.

Maybe that's simply a prompt to go and check out his five previous albums, which are all available on his Bandcamp page. This one isn't, for reasons of which I'm blissfully unaware. The prior three are similarly short, following the same seven song template, but the first couple seem longer, with 2018's 12th Street far more generous, boasting ten tracks, most of them in the four or five minute range. Maybe I'll pick that one up and see how he's developed in a decade and a half.

Friday, 3 March 2023

Moonlight Benjamin - Wayo (2023)

Here's something wonderfully primal from France via Haïti, where Moonlight Benjamin was born to a voodoo priestess. She grew up singing hymns in an orphanage, moved on to western rock and then studied jazz after moving to France. She'd already released world music albums by the time she had her own initiation into voodoo back in Haïti, but shifted to her very own voodoo rock style in 2018 with an album called Siltane. She followed that up with Simido in 2020 and now Wayo. It's a strong style, emphatic and commanding but full of excellent grooves.

Initially, I was reminded of Yma Sumac, of all people, even though the style is very different. Sure, both moved from poorer countries in the Americas to rich first world nations and incorporated an array of western styles of music into their sounds, but I'm thinking more of the way that they both create songs through vocalisations as much as by delivering lyrics. There's a lot going on vocally in the opening title track, but there aren't a lot of sung words. Of course, beyond some vocalisations that sound like birds chirping, the two sound very different indeed, because Sumac was thrown at exotica and Benjamin at garage rock. That shifts as the album moves on but it never quite leaves entirely.

There are other formative rock sounds here too. The guitars on Haut là haut remind of songs like Spirit in the Sky, but Benjamin dips the song firmly into Dr. John territory for a cajun swamp blues approach with plenty of handclaps. Sing along, cher! There's gospel here too and spirituals, some straight ahead blues and a smattering of shock rock. Moving her music in this direction was always going to trawl in Screamin' Jay Hawkins as well as more sedate personae as Dr. John.

The album moves along quickly. None of these songs are long, most of them in a range from under three minutes to three and a half. Only three of eleven exceed that and only Pè comes close to five minutes, not remotely outstaying its welcome. It's probably my favourite song here, because it's a pristine combination of world music and rock 'n' roll, Benjamin's low croon a sultry delight while a tribal beat and a rhythmic rock guitar fashion a groove behind her. It adds further world elements as it goes, the punctuating guitars and the vocal chants reminding of African music. It's simple for us to think of this as a voodoo ritual.

I say probably my favourite, because Freedom Fire right after it gives it a firm challenge, with a deliciously dark invitation of an opening that's utterly evocative. I saw this song as much as heard it and those are dangerous visions. I wonder what Benjamin does on stage, because this ought to have some sort of visual element to illustrate the danger. I checked out some of Benjamin's early world music and she didn't sing remotely this low on them. This is clearly for effect and it's a very good choice because the effect is powerful. I'd love to hear Benjamin tackle Earth Kitt's I Want to Be Evil, translated, of course, into French and shifted into this voodoo rock style.

There are other strong tracks too. Taye banda just won't leave me alone. Bafon has a real swagger to it that rolls along inexorably like a tank. Lilè does something similar but with more of a focus on those deliciously round sounds that Benjamin pours out. Sometimes it feels like she's only singing vowels and it sounds amazing. The core melody in Alé sounds very familiar, enough that I was with it singing along on my first listen, even though I don't know the words. It's a jaunty song with some of the most memorable guitars on the album, which combine with the tribal beat to nail another groove.

I like exploring world music and it's rare that I hear someone so clearly world music manage to find a strong synthesis with rock music. It happens but not so often as you'd think. What's more, for an artist to do that and end up in an original place is precious. It's not unprecedented, of course, with the names I've mentioned thus far clear influences and probably more too, but it's not something I've heard in a new album in a long while. I like.

Thursday, 5 January 2023

Robin Trower - No More Worlds to Conquer (2022)

There tend to be more best of year metal lists than rock lists, so I dug around to find the latter and accidentally noticed that, while I was wandering around the UK on a research trip last April, Robin Trower released a new album, and so that immediately became my number one priority to review. For those who don't know this legend of British rock music, he's been around for a long time and it would be highly recommended that you check out his back catalogue, starting with the 1974 album Bridge of Sighs, which was his second solo release after leaving Procul Harum.

He's a massively influential British blues rock guitarist, enough that people like Robert Fripp have studied under him, and he's kept on putting out new solo albums for the past half century. In fact, the first, Twice Removed from Yesterday, will be celebrating its fiftieth anniversary in March. This appears to be his twenty-sixth studio album and it highlights how he hasn't lost a bit of his power over all that time. His guitar remains delicious, even if it doesn't soar as often as it used to, and it shines from the very first song, Ball of Fire, a solid but relatively routine rocker to kick things off.

The album lit up for me when it slowed down for the title track. It's not Bridge of Sighs, but it plays in the same ballpark and it's a good song with some great guitarwork from Trower. Deadly Kiss is slower still, but with a funk edge, before Trower starts bending strings as only he can. It's clear at this point that these is going to be a collection of loose tracks that mostly exist as frameworks for Trower's guitar, hardly a surprising approach and not a particularly flattering one for musicians of this calibre but an understandable one nonetheless. By the time we get to Birdsong four in, it's as if it only exists for guitar and the vocals are just an added bonus.

A few songs late in the album feel like songs as well as showcases for Trower's guitar. Cloud Across the Sun is a solid blues number, if nothing particularly surprising. It kicks off like it's something off a Stevie Ray Vaughan album, but if Trower ever thought about showing off the way Stevie did, he's quick to restrain himself, even though this is one of the more up tempo songs on the album. He has a different, mellower mood in mind and, while there are levels of intensity here, they're all on the scale from mellow to mellower.

Case in point, Fire to Ashes is softer but a little more overt as a song, Richard Watts getting his teeth a bit more into this one. I like the balance in his voice between smooth and grit and he has a nice subtle sustain that works wonderfully on this sort of slow song. Sure, Trower takes over as it runs on, but both are notable here. The Razor's Edge adds some, well, edge before the drop down to the smoothest material wraps up with the smoothest, I Will Always Be Your Shelter wrapping up the album as the most overt ballad. It's the first song that feels like it's there for Watts as much as Trower.

And what all this means is that it's hard to decide on a favourite song because they're all much of a muchness, the truest song coming out on top, namely that closing ballad. It makes far more sense to talk about a favourite solo, because that's what this album is all about, Trower's glorious guitar, and that's still not an easy choice because everything here is good on that front. Maybe I might go for The Razor's Edge, maybe the title track, maybe that closer again. Who knows. It's the one that I have playing right now, whichever that happens to be.

Trower plays both guitar and bass on this album, as he's been doing for a while, but the latter isn't remotely as notable as the former. As a guitarist, he elevates every song here. As a bassist, he just adds the necessary support. Regular collaborator Chris Taggart provides the drums while Richard Watts brings his smooth and soulful voice to the mix for the first time. When there's organ, like on Fire to Ashes, that's provided by Paddy Milner.

And that's it. If you've never heard Trower before, this is as good an introduction as any to one of the pivotal guitarists of the rock era. It's far from his best album, though, and these are far from the best songs. It's all beautiful guitar music linked together by a capable vocalist to keep it fresh. Like I said, check out Bridge of Sighs, especially if you're a guitarist yourself, and weep at what he could do with his instrument. Then listen to this and realise that he can still do it all half a century on. Finally, pick up everything in between.

Wednesday, 7 December 2022

Lee Aaron - Elevate (2022)

Every time I review a few albums in a row that take me a while to fully appreciate, I end up with an abiding wonder as to whether I'm being deluged by too much new material and I need to step back for a while and level set myself again. Inevitably, though, before I do, something like this shows up that's as immediate as anything I've ever heard and bam, I'm level set again.

This is the second Lee Aaron album I've reviewed this year, but the other one, Radio On!, came out last July and I was catching up with it in January before drawing a line on the past year. This one is brand new, less than two weeks old as I write, so there are sixteen months between them, but it's rare for musicians to knock out two albums that quickly nowadays. Maybe the former was delayed due to COVID or maybe Aaron's on a creative kick right now. Whatever the reason, the last album was strong and this one's even better.

I mentioned a couple of things last time that are all the more obvious here. One is the intonation that Aaron brings to these songs, which could be used as a textbook. It isn't fair to say that she just sings these songs, because she does a lot more than that, she brings them to life so well that I felt that she was almost ready to climb through my computer monitor and continue singing to me from the edge of my desk. Whether she's adding vocal fry to snarl and croon out a rocker like The Devil U Know or delicately unfolding the story in a ballad like Red Dress, she endows her delivery with a character that will have other singers ringing their vocal coaches to let them in on the secret.

The other is that there are a lot of textures combining here and many of them feel like they're the work of a blues singer singing rock. For the most part, this is a pop/rock album, the music firmly on the rock side of that ever polarising boundary with quite a few toes immersed in the blues, but the sound is full of pop sensibility, infuriatingly catchy, with Freak Show top on that front. It often reminds of commercial Pat Benatar but the other influence ends up overwhelming that even on the lightest and poppiest numbers. That's the Rolling Stones, whose stamp is on this album from the very beginning.

Rock Bottom Revolution is an excellent opener that kicks in with a simple but highly effective riff from Sean Kelly, an even simpler and even more effective bass line from Dave Reimer and a sassy blues rock vocal from Aaron. There's blues here and rock and funk and pop and gospel behind the eventual build and it all ends up very much in Rolling Stones territory, commercial Stones sure and without the same tones but the Stones nonetheless. The blues rock number Trouble Maker is even more obvious and other songs play in this ballpark too, like the funky Still Alive and the title track that closes out the album.

What I took away from this one that's new is just how much fun Lee Aaron is obviously having. She has spent quite a while away from rock music, singing pop, blues and especially jazz, and it's clear that she likes her songs on the looser side nowadays where she and the musicians behind her can just enjoy the heck out of playing them. I'm sure that whenever they play these songs live, they're able to bring something just a little different to them that wasn't there the night before. I could even believe that with Red Dress, which is a story ballad. I tend to dread orchestrated ballads and often skip them on repeat listens, but I was hanging on every word this time.

There's a line in The Devil U Know when Aaron snarls, "I'm gonna rule this whole damn town", and I had no doubt that she meant it in that moment, but for the rest of that song and the rest of this album, I took back that belief because she's having so much obvious fun not running anything that she'd turn down a crown just to be able to move into the next song. And, while the songwriting and the simplicity and the looseness all play their part, it's that fun that makes this album so amazing. It's contagious. I may miss the Metal Queen I remember from my youth, but this album makes me want to play it over and over rather than pull earlier releases off the shelf. It's a peach.

Wednesday, 9 November 2022

Corky Laing - Finnish Sessions (2022)

Country: Canada
Style: Blues Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 14 Oct 2022
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Wikipedia | YouTube

Older rock fans will recognise Corky Laing as the drummer with Mountain, a heavy blues rock band who helped to influence the rise of heavy metal in the seventies. They were an American band, but Laing was Canadian and, as the title suggests, almost everyone involved in this album is Finnish. It seems that, since COVID-19, Laing has spent half his time in Finland and working with musicians of that nationality isn't anything new for him. In fact Harri Väyrynen, the multi-instrumentalist who plays guitar on this album, along with bass on one song and drums on another, is also the engineer at Laing's Finnish studio.

Oddly, Väyrynen isn't primarily known for heavy blues, being most famous for his work in Accu, who Discogs tell me are an "electronic disco funk rock band", and he underlines how varied this line-up truly is. Conny Bloom had a stint in Hanoi Rocks, one of Finland's most famous exports, even if he's also a Swede best known for funk metal band Electric Boys. Talking of Hanoi Rocks, the harmonica on Totally Wrong is played by Michael Monroe. Bassist John Vihervä is a bluesman, best known for his work with the Ben Granfelt Band, and Maria Hänninen is a natural born blues singer who takes the mike for two songs here, including the first single, Whatcha Doin'?

It's a good single, a sassy number enhanced by the trumpet of Antero Priha and some tick-tocking backing vocals, but I prefer Backbone, the other song featuring Hänninen on lead vocals. This is a lot closer to what she does with Mount Mary and, while they may not be as famous as other bands who lent their talents to this project (yet), anyone who's heard their 2021 debut album should be salivating at the idea of Maria singing in front of people like Laing and Bloom. Now, let's see who guests on their much anticipated follow-up, given that Michael Monroe contributed harmonica to the first one and this collection of musicians clearly work well together.

And talking of Monroe, it's the song on this album that features his harmonica that I'd call out as the other highlight. That's Totally Wrong and it's the most urgent track here, a killer heavy blues number that blisters out of the gate with Monroe's harmonica leading the way like the whistle on a steam train. Laing had varied his vocal approach a song earlier with The Ball, narrating most of that one rather than singing it, and he practically chants this one, shouting out the lyrics as if the band had turned it up to eleven in the studio and he didn't think he'd be heard over them.

Like Backbone, Totally Wrong is immediate because it nails its groove from the outset but it only gets better with repeat listens because we start to hear everything else that's going on in them. I adore the second half of Totally Wrong, when the guitars take a back seat so we can hear just how damn good Laing is behind the kit. The same goes for Backbone in a different way, because it's the guitar and lead vocal that grab us from the outset but we gradually realise just how much Laing is doing on drums in the background, especially during the second half.

While I'm concentrating on those two tracks, because I keep on replaying both of them and finding new reasons to adore them, the rest of the album is pretty solid too. It starts out traditionally but well with Everyone's Dream, gets more contemporary with The Ball, which stands out because of a very atypical vocal from Laing, and calms down for a trio of ballads in the middle of the album. It's Laing's voice that becomes most notable on these, because he has a rough, lived in voice that has an emotional resonance on these ballads. He's good on Even More but better yet on Pledge, with a folky edge that's only added to by Hänninen's violin on My World.

It's perhaps telling that those ballads don't lower my rating because three of them at once seems like a lot, especially given that I tend to dread ballads on urgent blues rock albums anyway. These certainly aren't my favourites and I'm not going to be replaying them anywhere near as often as I have already replayed Totally Wrong and Backbone—and I'm not done with those yet—but they do the job well and somehow don't drag the pace of the album down. In fact, maybe they help a little to emphasise Backbone before we ever get to it, given that that's what comes after the ballads.

It's also telling that I want more from this. These nine songs don't amount to much more than half an hour but it feels like everyone was having an absolute blast in the studio making them. I would very much like to hear Finnish Sessions II next year and, even more so, a live recording from a tiny Finnish club where Laing can show off a little more and the core band, plus whoever else happens to show up to guest, can jam on new songs and old standards and the audience can have stories to tell to the friends who missed the experience.

Thanks, Maria, for sending me a copy of this one for review!

Thursday, 9 June 2022

Colosseum - Restoration (2022)

Country: UK
Style: Jazz/Blues Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 15 Apr 2022
Sites: Facebook | Prog Archives | Wikipedia

Here's another band I remember from back in the day who have surprised me not only with a new release but with the fact that they're still together. Sure, they weren't for quite a while, as this is their fourth incarnation, but they weren't gone for anywhere near as long as I thought. They were a pioneering jazz rock band on their first go around, from 1969 to 1971, and a similarly pioneering jazz fusion band during their second shot, as Colosseum II from 1975 to 1978, with Gary Moore and Don Airey in their roster. And I thought that was it, but apparently not so.

The original line-up at the time of their split in 1971, including such luminaries as Dave Greenslade and Chris Farlowe, got back together in 1994 and stayed that way for a couple of decades, knocking out a couple of albums to add to the three from each previous period. They split up in 2015 but got back together in 2020 just in time for the pandemic. Greenslade didn't return and neither did Jon Hiseman, who had died in 2018 (Dick Heckstall-Smith had also died in 2004), but Farlowe did and so did long term members Dave Clempson and Mark Clarke, who collectively cover vocals, guitar and bass.

I remember Colosseum II more than Colosseum, but I remember them sounding more like heavier pieces here, albeit with the prominent soloing of Dick Heckstall-Smith's saxophone. By "heavier", I mean heavier from the perspective of the start of heavy music, in 1969 when Colosseum were the first band to see an album released on the Vertigo label, ahead of Black Sabbath. They played jazz rock so the songs were complex and the technical skill level needed to play them was high, but they drove songs hard back then, just like they do songs like I'll Show You Mine and Hesitation here, the former especially reminding of Cream and the way the latter moving into sax typical Colosseum.

And, with that said, it's the lighter stuff that stands out the most for me here. I like those heavier pieces, but Hesitation is more notable when moves into sax solo and wailing backing vocal, as if it could have been on The Dark Side of the Moon. That sax, played nowadays by Kim Nishikawara, is a constant highlight, often elevating songs. If Only Dreams Were Like This is a good one anyway, but the laid back sax makes it better. The bluesy Home by Dawn is another highlight, but the excellent sax solos make it better still. It doesn't do as much on the soulful blues called Need Somebody, but it helps anyway, as does the organ of Nick Steed, another new fish who joined in 2020. Tonight has an impressive balance, especially in its bookends, between sax, organ and Dave Clempson's guitar.

The highlight on Need Somebody is Chris Farlowe, demonstrating yet again that age doesn't make much difference when you have a stunning voice. Farlowe's been around for ever, as epitomised by the fact that he had a UK number one single in 1966, but he sounds great here at 81 years old. He isn't the only vocalist here, but he's the only dedicated vocalist, so that's him at the front just as it was for a couple of years half a century ago. What's perhaps most impressive is that he's always a highlight even when somehow turning it down a notch on songs like Tonight to not steal the show.

Instead, this feels like a group really finding these grooves together rather than a large collection of highly experienced stars swapping moments in the spotlight. Half the band were in the band in its heyday in 1970, if not 1969, while the other half only joined this most recent incarnation in 2020. They're veterans anyway, even if they ony have a mere three decades of professional work behind them, like Nishikawara and Steed, who are presumably here because they've toured and recorded with Farlowe. That leaves drummer Malcolm Mortimore, who's OG and played with everyone from Mick Jagger to Tom Jones, via Gentle Giant. There's a lot of talent in this band and I'm very happy to say that the material they play doesn't let that promise down. Welcome back, Colosseum!

Saturday, 22 January 2022

Lee Aaron - Radio On! (2021)

Here's an album I was looking forward to last year but lost track of due to events and so never got around to. I remember Lee Aaron from the early to mid eighties when she fronted a heavy metal band and then later in that decade when she went smoother hard rock. I know that she's kept on shifting gears throughout her career, moving into straight pop music, blues and especially jazz, a genre she found particular success in. I missed her return to rock music in 2016, which was Fire and Gasoline, but I didn't want to miss this one and I'm glad I didn't because it's a lot of fun.

Vampin' is a great opener because it's patient but engaging, hard but soft, rockin' but funky. It's a lot of different things all at once and it isn't just Lee Aaron's voice that shines. Sean Kelly turns in a sleazy rock riff to introduce the song and then finds a funky one to give it life. The shift is kind of like Mötley Crüe to Extreme and, later it goes to the blues bar, but Aaron herself finds a vocal line that works across the board. She's on top form here, sultry but powerful and she dominates, especially during the second half, which is a showcase for her. It's good when she isn't singing and there's some strong guitarwork from Sean Kelly, but it comes alive when she's back at the mike.

I call out the opener because it's a hard rock song on a melodic rock album. From here, things tend to soften up to the radio friendly melodic rock vibe that Aaron is going for here, everything vocals first and foremost and guitar the only other instrument getting a spotlight, Kelly delivering quite a few notable solos, my favourite perhaps being on Soul Breaker. Occasionally, a song might heavy up a little, like Mama Don't Remember and Soho Crawl, both of which remind of Heart, as indeed does Soul Breaker. Occasionally, one might soften up even more and turn into a ballad, as Wasted and Twenty One do almost at the end of the album.

What's interesting to me is that Aaron plays even more with vocal textures on the ballads, turning up the rasp. She's been singing for a long time now, in a recording career that reaches forty years in 2022, but I've never heard her explore so many textures on one album. So much of this features pristine intonation, but she rock 'n' rolls up whenever she wants to and every single nuance is very deliberate. I was prepared for any song to be paused so a YouTube vocal coach reactor could point out what she's doing in any particular moment.

Another thing I noticed is that some of these songs, especially the title track, feel like they're the creation of a blues singer who's recording a rock album rather than a rock singer returning to her roots. I wonder what genre she feels most comfortable in. Certainly my favourite songs here are a mix of genres, that sassy rocker, Vampin'; a melodic rock gem called Cmon; and a slow burner that kicks off the second side, by the name of Devil's Gold. This one's not really a ballad, even though it has to be slower than either of the real ballads here, and it has a western flavour. It sounds great on a first listen but it really gets under the skin and calls at us to return after the album is done.

This isn't one of those legendary comeback albums that rejuvenate careers, but it's enjoyable on a first time through and there are enough highlights to prompt us to play the whole thing again. I think it's a grower, but maybe a little front heavy, with most of the best songs in the first half and the ballads almost relegated to the end. It also benefits from the wild musical journey that Aaron has taken herself on over the past four decades, because, even from the outset, it's clearly never just another melodic rock album. Even when it's exploring ground that we know well, it's different because of what she brings to it. A belated welcome back to rock music, Lee!

Monday, 3 January 2022

Blue Merrow - Blue Merrow (2022)

Country: Spain
Style: Psychedelic Hard/Blues Rock
Rating: 9/10
Release Date: 1 Jan 2022
Sites: Instagram | YouTube

With an 2021 oversight album behind me today, let's launch into 2022 with something utterly wild, appropriately enough given that a merrow is a type of mermaid (or merman) in Celtic mythology. Just as such creatures swim free in the vast oceans, though bizarrely have to wear a special hat, a cochaillín draíochta, to ensure they can stay in the water, rather like a selkie skin in Scotland, this band swim free through the ocean of seventies rock genres. I wonder if the musicians each wear a little magic cap of their own on stage to stay with the mythology.

If it wasn't for the punchy 21st century production that's agreeably simple but very effective, this would sound like one of those hidden seventies gems that get turned up every once in a while in a backwoods town thrift store that doesn't look like it's opened for the past thirty years. If you're a crate digger, you'll know the sort of album. It would have a nondescript cover that prompts you to pick it up anyway for no reason you can place. You've never heard of the band or anyone in it but it might be worth the fifty cents they're asking to give it a listen. Then you slap it on your deck and it simply blows you away.

I certainly couldn't stop listening to it, even though part of that has to do with trying to figure out what the band is actually trying to do. I know next to nothing about them. They're Galician, from a province called Pontevedra. This is their debut album, even if it feels like they've all been playing music, and music together, for decades. Their Instagram says they play psychedelic hard rock and I can go along with that, but it doesn't remotely address everything that they do.

There are five musicians in the band though I had to translate a news article from the Spanish to find out who they are. The lead vocalist is Damián Garrido, who also plays percussion because I'd expected from the opener to find that he didn't only have a single role in the line-up. The insanely talented guitarist is Ángel Olañeta and I'm sure we're all going to hear a lot about him soon. The keyboardist and organist is Ángel Vejo, who's prominent on this album. That leaves Diego Hernán Ruiz on bass and Alberto Cid on drums.

Initially they sound prog rock. Uncle Tom opens up the album with an extended keyboard note that suggests something deep and purple, but it builds with melodies more reminiscent of Uriah Heep. It's all in that seventies heavy organ style and, when the drums and then the vocals join in, we find that it's all firmly prog, albeit very lively prog with accented vocals that are loose in a psychedelic fashion, prominent keyboards and a delightful guitar.

And then, two and a half minutes into the song, it suddenly turns into a rocking blues number. It's suddenly all about Rory Gallagher and Albert King and Alvin Lee. What's telling is that, whenever the vocalist chimes in with a few lines, he ends with a gleeful laugh and hands over to the band to just have some fun for a while, which they promptly do with abandon. It's quite the jam and it's an entirely joyous one, as if everyone involved has nothing they'd rather be doing with ther lives.

Blue Merrow is the epic of the album, at just over ten minutes, and it's a prog rock number again as it starts out, with water effects and vocalising from Garrido, playing a siren. Instruments show up and it's prog story time, children, but halfway it all gets down and funky, like Carlos Santana is suddenly jamming with Sly Stone. There's a solid heavy riff to get the second half into motion and I'm hearing Focus in where the song goes and plenty of Pink Floyd too—early seventies Floyd that is, pre-Alan Parsons tape manipulations.

Much of what follows mixes up those sounds. Three Ways to Say Goodbye plays like that early Pink Floyd style, psychedelia and originality blended into a fine rock song, but with some truly searing guitarwork from Olañeta. He sears the sky early in The Utopist and I could just see him playing in a sort of trance, with his eyes closed and his face contorted into the sort of unwieldy shapes that Gary Moore found when he wasn't merely playing an instrument but acting as a conduit through which magical sounds flow into our world. It's not just the guitar, with organ tones as gorgeously warm as those that Vejo conjures up here, but it's so often the guitar.

Images wraps up the album in a completely different fashion, given that it's a ballad that entirely strips away both guitar and organ, so that Garrido can shine over a singer/songwriter style piano. The band provide neat vocal harmonies rather than searing jams and solos, leaving this one a bit out of place on this album, but it's also a good song and it helps to highlight just how versatile this band is. Where have they been to conjure up sounds like these? Were they all born in 1955 and fell into a portal in time in 1971 that dumped them out in Galicia half a century later?

Whatever the answers to those questions happen to be, this is an absolute gem of a debut album and I can't believe, given that I only give out a few 9/10s every year, that I'm kicking off 2022 with one on my very first day of reviews.

Monday, 8 November 2021

Joe Bonamassa - Time Clocks (2021)

Joe Bonamassa is rightly known as one of modern America's pre-eminent blues guitarists, even if he's obviously more influenced by the British blues wave of the sixties. On his prior album, Royal Tea, he explored that side specifically, recording at Abbey Road and with British guests on board like Bernie Marsden. This one, his fifteenth, is less British but he's never going to lose the British sound entirely, even if this album starts out with hand held drums and didgeridoo.

In fact, there's a lot here to digest, so much so that there are many points where we forget this is a blues album. Not for long, mind you, but there's a very telling line in Notches to point out: "I've been all the way around the world, there and back a time of two; that road leads me home, brings me back to the blues." This does a lot of wandering around the world, but it always comes back to the blues, rather like a base of operations for Bonamassa's dabblings in prog rock or world music.

Notches certainly seems like an international song, with a British bassist, South African drummer and percussionist and a line of Australian backing singers. Of course, Bonamassa is American and so is Charlie Starr of Blackberry Smoke who co-wrote it, bringing some southern rock in with him. It's rooted in the blues, of course, but it's more southern rock than blues rock and the midsection gets neatly experimental, Bonamassa's blues guitar floating through its landscape.

Similarly, Time Clocks is rooted in the blues but we often forget that. It's soft rock, it's arena rock and it's even country, especially in Bonamassa's guitar, which is often notable for how prominent it isn't. This is a good song that's hard not to like and hard not to sing along with, but it's often an oddly commercial Pink Floyd type of song, which isn't what I expected here. What I expected was a song like The Heart That Never Waits, the unadventurous blues song that sits between these two more interesting numbers.

And so it goes. There are routine blues songs here and there are more interesting diversions from the genre, always built on the blues but happy to move quite a decent way from it. Frankly, when it plays it safe, it's enjoyable but forgettable. Mind's Eye has us close our eyes and rock in our seats, because Bonamassa does this so effortlessly well, but I was forgetting it even as it played, with an earlier song like Questions and Answers stuck in my head instead.

Yet, even there, while it's agreeably odd, it's odd in an oddly mainstream way. It feels as if it's a dangerous song rendered safe so it doesn't bite us, strongly reminiscent of Tom Waits but with Mark Ribot's jagged guitar and Waits's unmistakeable roar replaced by smoothed out edges and smoother vocals. It grabs the ear but I'm aching to hear the non-existent original. The same goes for The Loyal Kind, with its Celtic whistle and folky melodies. It's a nice enough song, but it ought to be led by a strong female voice that transports us to the forest rather than soothe us like some citrus lozenge. It does find some balls, but only at points.

And I feel out of place for thinking this. Somehow, I think most of the people buying this are going to be happiest with the songs I like least, the effortless soulful funky blues of Hanging on a Loser, Curtain Call and The Heart That Never Waits. They're going to skip the songs that grabbed me the most, like Notches, Question and Answers and even the title track. Where they and I will meet is in a shared appreciation of Bonamassa's talents. Where we'll diverge once more is in what we think about how he uses them.

Frankly, I'd like him to shut up and play his guitar, as Frank Zappa put it, because his guitar is much more interesting to me than his vocals. And I'd like him to take more of the experimental turns he took here but to take the training wheels off when he does so, because he doesn't need them. It's as if he's feeling his middle age and thinks he's playing to the Jimmy Buffett audience. Sure, you'd started out because you heard Clapton, Joe, and he's as safe as they get nowadays, but you heard him do Crossroads in the sixties and he blistered. Don't you want to blister too?

Wednesday, 7 July 2021

Billy F Gibbons - Hardware (2021)

Country: USA
Style: Blues Rock
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 4 Jun 2021
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia

Yes, this Billy F. Gibbons is the Billy Gibbons you're thinking of, who formed ZZ Top as far back as 1969. This is his third solo album and it's a decent effort that sounds exactly like you're expecting. If there's anything surprising here, it's the presence of someone like Matt Sorum, best known for his work with Guns n' Roses, the Cult and Velvet Revolver. Sorum doesn't just co-produce, he's part of the band with long time Gibbons collaborator, guitarist Austin Hanks.

That production feels nicely stripped down. Those of you who prefer an album like Tres Hombres to an album like Eliminator ought to get a kick out of how stripped down and dirty this sounds, especially on highlights like My Lucky Card and Stackin' Bones, the former of which is all about Gibbon's guitar and the latter of which features a gorgeous rumbling bass too. It's the only song with guests, who are the blues rock outfit Larkin Poe. The best songs are the ones that go back to basics, with a strong riff, nice beat and catchy vocals.

That's not to suggest that this album sounds like it was recorded in 1973. More-More-More has all the post-production gimmickry that we know from later ZZ Top albums from Afterburner on and it's a good song too, but I definitely like my blues boogie as raw as is humanly possible. However, my fundamental problem with this album isn't with these variances in production. It's with the songwriting.

Of course, whatever Gibbons does will have me tapping my feet along, but there are songs here that I swear he could have written in his sleep and quite possibly did. A song like Vagabond Man, which has a Tom Waits vibe to it, is worthy not because it's a good song but because his guitarwork shines. I could listen to Gibbons play guitar for hours, whether he's delivering a searing solo or merely embellishing verses with all the right notes, both of which he does on this slow blues.

The worst song is surely Spanish Fly, but a good proportion of the dozen songs on offer here are really average pieces that happen to be elevated by what Gibbons does on them with his Les Paul. He has fun on Spanish Fly and, when I stopped listening to the song and focused on just his guitar, I had fun too. If you only care about that guitar, this is recommended. If, on the other hand, you want songs that camp out in your brain, there aren't many here to call home about.

Stackin' Bones is easily my favourite, with My Lucky Card and Shuffle, Step & Slide behind it. I also dug West Coast Junkie, which sees Gibbons layering his ZZ Top vocal over a surf rock song, a combination I could easily see populating an album on its own. Other songs to do something interesting include Hey Baby, Que Paso, a cover of a bilingual song by the Texas Tornados which has a serious Latin flavour to it, albeit not as much as the original, which features a prominent accordion; and the album's closer, a spoken word poem called Desert High.

Those are highlights because they're different and Gibbons doing something different is always worth checking out. The problem the album has is that much of it is Gibbons doing something he's done for a longer time than I've been alive and I'm half a century old. To retread ground that worn, he needed to find better material.

Friday, 2 July 2021

Myles Kennedy - The Ides of March (2021)

I'm not the biggest fan of the safe commercial brand of alternative grunge rock that Alter Bridge play but I can acknowledge that they're very good at what they do and it's difficult not to be happy when a song like Open Your Eyes comes on at the bowling alley, given everything that was playing before it. In that scenario, even a band like Creed sounds good! However, I have a special level of respect for Myles Kennedy, their lead singer (and a capable guitarist), because he can put his ego on hold to support a different artist, as he does when his solo band, Myles Kennedy and the Conspirators, transform into a backing band for Slash. I'm not aware of a lot of examples of this, but I think of it as a Nils Lofgren sort of thing, given that he gave up a successful international solo career to play for Bruce Springsteen.

This is a solo album and, while Kennedy has said that the song Moonshot is about wanting to get back on the road with his bandmates, I'm not sure which bandmates he was talking about. There's nobody here from either Alter Bridge or the Conspirators and Slash does not show up for a guest appearance. Kennedy sings and plays most of the stringed instruments: guitar, banjo, lap steel and mandolin, even the bass when Tim Tournier isn't providing that. Zia Uddin handles drums and percussion and Michael Baskette, the album's producer, contributes keyboards.

What they collectively deliver here is a straight ahead rock album with some songs that look back at a particular artist or style and Kennedy's vocals change accordingly.

For instance, he takes on a David Coverdale approach for the album's closer, Worried Mind, which is a minimal bluesy ballad with emotion paramount. It's an original song, even if it's clearly influenced by Need Your Love So Bad, the old Fleetwood Mac song (originally recorded by Little Willie John in 1955). He does something similar on Love Rain Down, which is less minimal but also worthy.

However, on the title track, easily the longest and to my mind, the best piece here, Kennedy channels David Bowie in the seventies, at least once he gets past the intro. This one is a wildly varied track that goes all over the place stylistically, but always to excellent effect. Once we've heard that one, it's easy to hear Bowie all over the album but it's never remotely as overt as it is on The Ides of March.

The other approach I really like is the use of slide guitar, which is most obvious on In Stride but also on Tell It Like It Is. Kennedy was hired into Alter Bridge on the basis of his voice because they wanted him to sing for them, but they were reportedly shocked at how proficient a guitarist he was too. He's been the rhythm guitarist behind Slash on those collaborative albums and tours, but he plays lead here and clearly has a lot of fun with it. There are bands who would hire him on his slide playing ability alone.

I should also mention that In Stride is an upbeat rocker, as is another highlight here, Get Along, which opens the album in style. Sure, the latter isn't particularly fast but it's always upbeat and ever ready to build into something. What it ends up building into is A Thousand Words, which is the grower on the album for me. It occupies a strange place in between Whitesnake and Soundgarden but it resonates a lot more than the songs around it. It may well be my favourite song here that isn't the title track and I certainly wouldn't have said that after my first listen.

And that probably fairly highlights that this is a worthy album. The first half is great and the second is often pretty good too, even if there are quite a few songs there that never really got a grip on me. It's certainly an album to listen to on its own merits, though, not just because any song chosen at random from it would sound much better than anything else on the bowling alley's dismal playlist.

Friday, 28 May 2021

Gary Moore - How Blue Can You Get (2021)

Country: UK
Style: Blues
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 30 Apr 2021
Sites: Facebook | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia

Continuing in the vein of previously unreleased songs finally seeing the light, which encompasses the Cirith Ungol and Serj Tankian EPs that I've reviewed this week, here's a new album from Gary Moore, who died a decade ago. Holy crap, has it been that long? Yes, indeed: he left us on 6th February, 2011 and I remember that announcement, because Moore was one of the best blues rock guitarists of all time and, while I first heard him playing straight forward rock and later metal in the eighties, it still stuns me that so many people haven't yet discovered his talents.

It's happening. He comes up a lot on YouTube nowadays, with many commenters spreading the word of a Montreux Jazz Festival cover of Roy Buchanan's timeless The Messiah Will Come Again as being the single best guitar performance of all time. It may be or it may not be—and, if you haven't see it, you should check it out sharpish—but there's no debate around Moore being able to make a guitar speak, soar and scream like few others in history and the first couple of tracks here follow him doing exactly that. They're both covers, a six minute rendition of Freddie King's I'm Tore Down and a much shorter take on Memphis Slim's Steppin' Out, but that really doesn't matter when it comes to solos and these solos truly blister.

There are eight songs on offer here, each taken from a different era in Moore's career but all firmly focused on the blues. I believe half are originals, including some beautiful slow blues numbers. In My Dreams is quite a departure from the two openers but it's a highlight nonetheless and the vibe of the album isn't lost. Love Can Make a Fool of You is even better and that goes double for the closer, Living with the Blues, which is the longest track on the album, albeit only just, and it puts that timeframe to great use. It's fair to say that, when half the songs on this album were originally by other major artists but the best ones are yours, you're doing something really right.

If you're looking for covers, the best known song is probably How Blue Can You Get, which is obviously a B. B. King number from its opening notes, even if you don't know the original. However, it's my least favourite cover here for precisely that reason. Everything else feels like Gary Moore, even if you have a background in the classic bluesmen that he's covering, but this one can't escape its origins with B. B. The last of the four, just for reference, is Done Somebody Wrong, originally by Elmore James. I'd plump for the two openers as the cover highlights.

There's really only one downside to this album, beyond Moore not being around to promote it, and it's the remaining original, Looking at Your Picture. It's not that it's a bad song, because it isn't. However, it just doesn't work in this company. It's a brooding blues number clad in alt rock clothes and, even if it plays well in isolation, it feels emphatically out of place here, whether we're looking at style, tone or even production. I get that these songs were recorded at different times in Moore's career but seven of them fit well together and this one really doesn't.

What's most annoying is that this album would still run forty minutes with this song excised and that's how it should have been released. I guess we need to excise it ourselves. Buy the album on streaming and ditch track five. You can thank me later.

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