RHR

I love a good Southern flavoured rock band and there seems to have been quite a British resurgence lately with bands such as Bad Touch and Those Damn Crows rightly grabbing kudos but this new one from RHR (Redfern, Hutchinson, Ross) is a real cut above.

I loved it from the opening notes of ‘She Painted The Moon’ where they kick off with a mammoth riff and counterpoint slide. Put simply, this one kicks ass – hard.

The band consist of Troy Redfern on vocals and slide guitar, Jack Hutchinson on guitars and vocals and Mike Ross also on vocals, bass and guitars together with Darren Lee on drums.
They are all stalwarts of the British Blues-rock scene and this collaboration has the sound and feel of a real meeting of minds. The songwriting is shared with each of the three contributing songs and only a couple of RHR Collaboration credits but the whole feel of the album is of a band – multi-talented and with different style but a real band nonetheless.

It isn’t all bombast and braggadocio. ‘Judgement Day’ is a dark and harsh Americana piece with a martial beat and stunning guitar solo while ‘Mahogany’ has an almost sixties feel to it – it is a band number with all three members contributing solo passage to it.

‘ Satisfied’ brings us back to the heavy again with a pounding drum beat and shrieked vocals – I assume from Troy Redfern – giving the song a really dense and eerie edge to it.

My favourite song on the album is probably ‘Leviathan’. A Mike Ross number with some fine steel stringed resonator guitar. Old style Blues but with an almost biblical tinge to it.

They are a band I want very much to catch live. Every member brings something to a very good party and it is becoming one of my go-to albums of the moment.