Not your average Blues/Rockers! I cued this one up, expecting the usual lacklustre take on Blues and rock and about thirty seconds in I was already getting excited. There is an immediacy and a cohesiveness that really sets them apart.
I love the growled vocals by Brandon Teskey, along with his dark guitar work – the last guitarists I heard playing this dark and heavy are Wilson T King or Robin Trower – I heard him in his previous band Until The Sun and he has lost none of what made him a very fine guitarist. Co-founder Brandon Gaddy delivers heavy drum lines, heavy on the tom-tom and subtle on the cymbals. Matt Baldwin on Bass & Peter Murphy - Keyboard, Backup Vocals makeup the rest of the lineup, both very able.
The whole album has the feel of a band working tightly together and it has the organic feel of a band working out ideas in the studio. “It dawned on me that many of my favorite records, such as Led Zeppelin I, Jimi Hendrix's Are You Experienced, Cream's Disraeli Gears, Stevie Ray Vaughan & Double Trouble's Texas Flood, The Rolling Stones' Let It Bleed, The Paul Butterfield Blues Band, and all the early Delta and Chicago blues albums were all recorded live in the studio with limited tracks," says Brandon Teskey. "Those albums seemed to have a raw energy. They left their mistakes in or used them to their advantage. Instead of using recording techniques of layering each individual instrument to a click track, that often can turn out sterile in the end, they used their cohesiveness as a group, and the musicianship of the band to carry the performances. I wanted to make an album like that.”
The range of material is impressive. ‘Don’t Take My Angel’ is slow and dark, ‘I Wanna Make The World Sing’ is massive and complex and ‘Lemontree’ is a gorgeously silly old-style Blues number. ‘Shadowside’ verges on grunge while ‘White Wolf’ is Nirvana if Hendrix were the guitarist.
Altogether, an album that really works on all levels. Colour me impressed.
