Bluesmix

Bluesmix have been around for a few years now and they do their ‘thing’ better than most on the Blues and R&B circuit. That ‘Thing’ is understated Blues with easy rolling groove, great to dance to and good enough to listen to when you can’t shake that thang – trust me that that combination is pretty rare today.

This is their third album and it shows that they are developing as a band. Rob Fleming’s guitar is fine and set against Bob Morgan’s keyboards and sax it enables them to set up a funky groove that could get a corpse twitching: ‘Well Well’ is a case in point, an insidious little groover that sneaks up on you with a N’Orleans gait and fonk so that you suddenly find yourself boogying across the room (not good while in the bath!).
Emil Engstrom lays down some soft but powerful bass and Ivan Komanak’s drumming is subtle but insistent in the background.

You might guess from all this that I have been enjoying the heck out of this album and you would not be wrong. They are not earthmovers and they aren’t trying to redevelop their genre and I like that. They are playing fine Blues and definitely have a sound that is both distinctive and comfortably familiar – tracks like ‘I Really Want You Around’ hark right back to bands like Spencer Davis and Chris Farlowe in the sixties while ‘Heartbreaker’ has a fifties feel with touches of Louis Jourdan from the forties but ‘Time Was On My Side’ has a timeless quality that chills to the bone. Best number here is probably ‘Running Through Rain’ with a strong jazzy feel to it and a dark edge – this is a band of the city streets and they do their best stuff there.

I’ve seen the band live cooking up a fine groove there and this is a pretty fair representation of what they do – like every band they are hotter live but this is a fine groove daddy-o.