ROUND-UP: BLUES
The Black Keys Ohio Players NONESUCH
Two decades after Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney stripped the blues-band format back to the bone, the Ohio duo’s twelfth album is their most sociable yet, with a guest list that includes Beck, Noel Gallagher, a brace of Memphis rappers and more besides.
If you haven’t yet heard the album’s lead single Beautiful People (Stay High), rectify that. It’s a tearaway slice of whiteboy soul, so immediate that you’ll join the cast-of-thousands vocal by the second chorus. The rest of Ohio Players is almost as good, with the greasy bass line of opener This Is Nowhere setting up a record that is strikingly funky.
On The Game (the best of Gallagher’s three contributions) is a classy honeycrunch jangler, the snake-hipped Please Me (Till I’m Satisfied) is anointed by the same voodoo priest as the Stones’ Sympathy For The Devil, while Don’t Let Me Go splices Nick Cave’s Red Right Hand with the Four Tops’ Motown classic Reach Out I’ll Be There.
Armed with tunes this catchy, if The Black Keys aren’t careful they’ll be the biggest band in the world all over again.
Susan Santos Sonora SELF-RELEASED
Plenty of musicians have tried to capture the desert, but this is one of the most evocative in recent memory, the Madrid guitarist’s heavy grooves conjuring an atmosphere of beauty and danger, her lyrics nodding to burnished sands and banditos. Try lead single Hot Rod Lady, its piston-pump momentum moving like a Mad Max motorcade, and dive deeper from there.
Jack J Hutchinson Battles SELF-RELEASED
Blues is still a strand of Hutchinson’s modus operandi, but he’s far too questing a songwriter to bow to its dogma, and Battles sprawls from knuckle-popping thrash to power ballads. Sung at times with the edgy, urgent sneer of a young Liam Gallagher, it’s another emphatic step up from an everyman performer who could be very special indeed.
Katie Henry Get Goin’ RUF
The New Jersey multiinstrumentalist set the pace with 2022’s On My Way, now Get Goin’ builds the momentum for one of Ruf’s best young signings. There’s muscle on cuts like confessional Love Like Kerosene (‘I been sleeping with the bottle, he’s not finished with me yet ’), while the breeziness of the country-touched Get Goin’ Get Gone belies the hard-won wisdom within.
Cedric Burnside Hill Country Love PROVOGUE/MASCOT
Having played drums from age 13 for his storied late grandfather R.L. Burnside, it falls to solo artist Cedric and his fellow holdouts to keep the heritage of the North Mississippi hill music alive. Following 2021’s Grammywinning I Be Trying, this stellar collection of rough, rustic songs will make urbanites cream over its earthy authenticity.